


Season Four

by vechtkoe



Category: Hemlock Grove
Genre: (almost) everyone is dead, Multi, season 3 fixit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2018-10-23 01:11:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 50,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10709007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vechtkoe/pseuds/vechtkoe
Summary: Picks up right where the show left off.A lot of people are dead. Some of them deader than others.But something stirs in Hemlock Grove.





	1. Episode 1: Flesh Without Blood

**Author's Note:**

> Like most people, I was left shaking my head at the ending of the show, which was clearly not how it was intended by the original writing team.  
> This is me cleaning up the mess, fixing things, without pretending that Brian's Song (S03E10) didn't happen.
> 
> This show deserved better. It still deserves better.
> 
> I'm generally trying to release a new episode every two months. If life doesn't get in the way, I can manage that.
> 
> Oh yeah, each episode ends with a tune, marked with a ♫  
> Feel free to look them up on Youtube or Spotify or whatever. They're pretty good, and of course relevant to the episodes.

**PETER**

You ever been really drunk, like really drunk, and you can't stop doing what you're doing?  
Your body is like this big, stupid, jelly puppet and it's great, because you don't give a shit about anything. Except you gotta keep moving. No rest. No breaks. Keep moving. Forever, always.

There's things around you, in front of you. The walls, lights, people, rotting sweat, noises that ring in and out, whatever.  
All of that shit, the rhythm, the waves, left, right, left, right, all your senses are punching your gut from the inside out.

And you keep going and going because if you stop moving, then everything, all of those things around you, will take away the momentum that you had.  
The walls, the floor, the people - they'll catch up, they'll put you right in the middle. That's the carnival. It's like a wheel. You'll be like the axis, the only thing that doesn't move while everything spins.

Think that's funny?  
It's like some giant tsunami of acid and shit, and it crashes all around you and bends people's limbs until they break, screaming and pissing themselves. And you're just quiet in the middle, totally clean, seeing it all, too confused and stupid to help them while their skin comes off like a rubber glove.

Shut up, nobody's listening.  
Keep moving.  
Run, don't stop. Don't trip. If you stumble, get back up.  
If you don't, it's just you and the carnival.

The last time that happened, I did something really bad.

When you're moving, faces don't mean shit. They look at you sometimes, but only for a second. You disappear. You're nothing.

But when you're in the middle, you can feel them seeing you.  
You remember.  
They remember what you did. And then you'll wish you were a lot drunker than you think you are.

But I'm not drunk. I'm just running, ripping things apart.  
Trying to wash something off my teeth.

I'm so sorry.

++

**FELMAN**

Rewind a couple of days. It was dark outside Godfrey Mansion and it had been mostly quiet for about three minutes now.

Before that, there had been some growling, the sound of breaking glass and the crunch of Roman Godfrey's body hitting the ground.

Things got a little quieter after that.  
A man called Felman was watching, from not too far away.

He saw the vargulf bite Roman's throat out. Then his heart.

And Felman's own heart stirred with relief and giddy affirmation when the beast dropped the organ from its mouth before prowling off towards the woods.

Felman waited until he was certain it was gone.  
Then he made his way to the body that the wolf had left ripped open, uneaten. The wounds were still steaming, of course, and the air smelled like carcass.

Quickly, carefully, Felman knelt down, lifted the discarded heart from the grass and inspected it.  
The aorta hung limp and purple. The muscle had been punctured, but not shredded. All in all, it looked good enough to wrap in cling-film and sell for a good price at one of the finer delis.

But that wasn't in the cards tonight.  
Maybe if Roman Godfrey had been human. There's a market for everything.

Felman gently laid the heart back in the red-stained patch of grass where he had found it.

Then he leaned over the young man's torso. The wound was massive. A hole in the chest that had of course flooded with blood.

Felman glanced at the face. It was intact. Handsome kid, even in this unfortunate state. The eyes were particularly striking. He would have been thrilled to harvest them, if this had been that kind of job.

Felman grunted quietly to himself, punctuating his own admiration.

He noticed the kid's mouth was half open. Along with the open eyes, it gave the face an awestruck expression.  
Imminent brutal death tends to have that peculiar effect on people.  
At least he must have passed out quickly, despite being upir.

Felman looked to the hole in his chest again. He noticed the displaced bottom of the sternum. A sliver of greyish white among pink and red.

Carefully, he dipped his fingers into the hole. Felman couldn't see much through the blood, so he chewed on his bottom lip in utmost concentration as he fumbled with the slippery arteries until he managed to pinch the aorta's loose end between his thumb and forefinger.

Good. The parts were here.  
Now he had to be quick. The Godfrey kid's brain had already been cut off from oxygen for a little longer than deemed desirable.

It was time to get to work.  
In his other, still unstained hand, Felman held a silver needle with a single fine, long black hair threaded through its eye.

++

**PRYCE**

In spite of extensive and persistent choral praise pertaining to enduring existence beyond the physical shell, comma, I confess that I find the practical experience of it vastly overrated. Full stop.

In effect, comma, I find myself yearning for the halcyon days of my father's cupboard. Full stop.

During my sojourn in this digitized state, comma, I have attempted to measure time, comma, but short of reducing my considerable faculties to the level of a stopwatch, comma, I find it impracticable to the level of impossible. Full stop.

Instead, comma, I will continue to focus on the undying art of self-amusement, comma, and replay my erotic exploits in various newly imagined configurations. Full stop.

I am so fucking bored. Full stop.

++

**PETER**

I can tell I'm tired, because I can actually think this.

I'm so fucking angry. Feels like hot coals squeezing through my veins and there's no way to get them out.  
They just go round and round, like nothing's the matter. Like nothing fucking matters.

The vargulf hasn't killed for hours. Makes me want to bite my own leg. Tendon and bone. My kingdom for tendon and bone.  
Just to feel it, not to eat.  
Too tired to eat anything.

Rabbit stew leftovers.  
And then to school.

Some little prick poked a finger in my chest, and I ended up punching him in the cheek, but another kid yanked my lunchbox out of my pack and the stew ended up all over the hallway.

The vargulf is snarling as I remember this, so I probably shouldn't, but then the first kid - with a stupid, yelping whimper as he stood there, holding his cheek - started yelling that the little gypsy scum ate shit for lunch.

A few girls who had just turned the corner saw the dark brown spatters, put their hands to their mouths and said it was disgusting.

The rough brush of hair on my neck stands up and my lips draw back. Oh, I wanted that little prick to see it. I wanted him to know.  
And then, yes, I wanted him to see his insides come out like he was giving birth to worms.  
And I hope he paid attention in Biology, because I remember what he smells like and - Rabbit!

Burst into running, my soles bled warm. Teeth out... and in...  
Pink balloon of guts.  
Damn thing is dead before the wolf can even begin to rip it apart.

++

**ROMAN**

What... the fuck?

++

**FELMAN**

Half an hour since Felman delivered the Godfrey boy. His car still stood parked by the side of the road, lights off.  
It was the darkest spot he could find, just under a hunched-over oak tree. Felman liked staying there for a little while after work.

Too awake now to go home, because there was nothing to do there but go to bed.

Payment had already been confirmed. Felman checked the sum again on his phone, just in case.  
He didn't do it for the money, but he had a family to support. And his employer didn't seem to mind, since his fee was always extremely reasonable. Others might say he was criminally underpaid.

Sure, he did mean to up his mortgage next year, but that was all small potatoes compared to changing the world.  
Truly changing it.

He clicked his phone shut and tossed it onto the passenger seat.  
He sighed.  
From what he had heard, Roman Godfrey hadn't been a popular kid. Then again, kids all seemed assholes these days.

Maybe that would change again. Maybe not.  
Felman lived in the now. Whatever little joys came his way, he accepted. The bad stuff, well.. he was sure it would be his turn again soon.

++

**ROMAN**

Fuck. No.  
Oh fuck, I'm still here.

I'm still here.

No no no no no Jesus buttfucking faggot Christ!  
What's it going to take?!

Am I that fucking immortal?!

Let me.  
Just let me go. I told you I'm done.

Come back and finish it.  
Peter.  
Anyone.  
Help.

I can't see shit.  
Can't feel shit either.

Wait.  
Is this..  
Is my head off?  
Am I a severed head?

Oh fuck.

How long can a head live?  
How the fuck would anyone know?  
Does it hurt? Is there anything to hurt?

Please, let that be it.  
Let me just be a head with no body waiting for my brain to finish bleeding out.

Nevermind me, just dying here.  
This is still my house. Get off the grass.

I guess I'm crying, but I'm just making stupid sobbing sounds in my thoughts.  
Never thought I'd miss tears.

Shit. I hope someone takes care of Shelley.  
Does she know?  
I don't want her to go kill Peter or something.

Enough. It's all been enough.  
Not that there's a goddamn thing I can do about it anyway.

Oh. What.

Ugh.

Light?

++

**PETER**

It's dawn or dusk, I don't even remember what comes first and what comes after, leapt over the fallen husk of a tree, shit brown flashes of flesh of rabbit, the tower, GYPSY KILLERS, my eyes, I ate my eyes, eye hate my skull is boiling.  
The sour pit of my throat wants to throw out my stomach.

Pretty flowers, ate a whole lot of them.  
Conium macalatum. Oh, that burns. Oh yes, you motherfucker.

The wolf howls ragged and then stops.  
We smell something.

++

**HEMLOCK HIGH**

The woods were here long before the town, and they will be here long after the town is gone.

But until then, there's another year at Hemlock High.  
The sun was shining, the birds sang the tune of summer. Sheets of paper were pinned to walls, stickers were put on lockers. Skirts were short, boys nudged each other.

Malena Moore was kinda on edge. She was in ninth grade, but this felt a little like her first day ever at Hemlock.  
She'd walked into the hallway almost five minutes ago, but still hadn't seen any of her friends come in. Malena was normally the last to show up, so this was a little weird.

The longer she waited, the more her stomach felt like a bag of rainwater slowly filling up.  
Or maybe she just had to pee.

Girls got killed in Hemlock Grove. Malena hadn't known any of the ones that got murdered two summers ago, but that stuff sticks to a small town.  
Most people weren't really that wigged out about it anymore. Last year, there'd been a memorial. Teary-eyed teachers. Picture frames and flowers.

Things were pretty much normal again after that. Some dumbass came to school wearing one of those serial killer hockeymasks once. He was just goofing around, but the sheriff showed up at his home later and nearly broke his wrist.

Malena was about to text someone when Jeri Hewitt came in through the double door.  
With a sigh of relief and exasperation, she put away her phone and waved at her friend.

\- "Hey monkey tits"  
\- "Hey shithead"

Jeri always had that spring in her step. Especially when there was gym class.  
When she was little and it was summer, her parents and friends always had to chase her with sunblock, but she outran them every time.  
So her freckled skin often had a dangerously red sheen over it.  
Jeri just loved the outside and there was no holding her back when the sun was out.

Malena picked up her bag and waited for Jeri to catch up.  
She admired her friend's athletic build, but she wasn't jealous. Malena was pleased with her own body. Still, sometimes she wished she could run like Jeri could.  
Or kick like she could.  
And on top of that, Jeri had ass, and knew how to walk it.  
Okay, maybe a little jealous.

But boys also liked Malena plenty. Jeri said she had the kind of blonde hair that made them trip over their feet before they were even standing.

Anyway, here was Jeri now.

\- "Where were you?" inquired Malena.  
\- "Boyd was giving me shit."  
\- "What?"  
\- "Yeah."  
\- "About the..." Malena drew out the last word.

She didn't really remember what the deal with Jeri and Boyd was, but she didn't want to sound like she was out of the loop.

"Yeah. Anyway.." Jeri rolled her eyes, clearly not eager to pursue the topic.  
"Anyway.." Malena echoed.

The girls started a slow walk down the hall. It was still ten minutes till class.

"Hey, where's Ariel?" Jeri asked.  
Malena shrugged. "Dead, I guess." she said flatly.

Jeri sighed.  
\- "If Ariel dies, it's because she like literally bleeds to death every month. I thought she was one of those free-bleeding freaks, but then I saw her change tampons.. so I dunno.. It's like the bottom falls out of her or something."  
\- "Extreme."  
\- "Extreme."

They walked.

They talked about how a whole bunch of kids had dropped out.  
And soon, they figured out it was mostly the richer kids, whose rich parents had suddenly found themselves out of a job.  
The reason? Godfrey Industries had laid off a whole battery of employees since the death of Johann Pryce.

"Pryce was crazy." said Jeri.  
Malena nodded, eyebrows raised.

The first two days after Pryce's funeral, some crazy guy kept showing up outside the tower, clutching at random people and hissing nonsense to them about Pryce having faked his death or something.  
The third day, the crazy guy didn't show up anymore.  
Nor on the fourth.

Jeri shrugged.  
"Like that's the weirdest thing around here." she said.  
"Yeah.. Well.. Maybe things are getting back to normal." blurted Malena, "Even Shelley Godfrey's left."  
Jeri scoffed. "If shit's getting so weird that even the weirdos are leaving, then we are _way_ far away from normal."

Malena thought about that and almost jumped when the bell started ringing.

++

**ROMAN**

Every time my eyes open, I'm strapped standing up to some panel. Pretty sure I'm naked.

It's all blurry, but I can see I'm in some shithole room with see-through plastic tarp all over the walls and the ceiling.  
Through the blur of the material, I think I can make out wooden paneling.

The plastic probably covers the floor too, but I can't look down. I've tried, but my eyes don't move. Not in any direction.

Matter of fact, I never remember opening my eyes. Something just makes my eyelids flip up, like someone pressing a button on a doll.  
It's like some fucked up waking dream.

I can smell bits of plastic. Chloride. Iodine. Dried blood. Clove.

Oh, and every time my eyes open, there's two assholes in labcoats. One of them has this thin gay moustache and really slitty eyes. Not Asian slitty, more like a paedophile or something.  
The coats - the actual coats they wear - could be from the Institute, but I can't see well enough.

There's cables and tubes coming out of a machine that they must have wheeled in, and they all lead up to me.

Sometimes I feel something tugging at my guts or my side and sometimes it tickles so much that I have to either laugh or piss. But I can't do those things either, I guess.

And it hurts too.  
Kinda like when Pryce performed that gene therapy thing, clearing out all my organs and tissues.

Did Olivia set this up? Fucking bitch, get your leeching claws off me. Die die die. I'm done. I don't want to feel this. I don't want to feel at all. What the fuck for?

When they're done for the day - hour, whatever, I have no clue, I don't remember sleeping - the assholes in labcoats switch everything off.

Lights out.

Lights on.

I don't have any sense of time having passed, but here they go again.  
My eyes open. (Are they even mine?)

This time, there's a tall guy standing in front of the labcoats. No doubt he's in charge of all this.  
He's dressed expensive, like a foxhunter or something. Blue eyes, white hair, tweed jacket.  
Never seen him before.

When he comes closer, I can smell a tinge of leather. Makes my mouth water. Leather always did that for me. Same way that some people like the smell of paint or gasoline.

The guy flicks out a lighter and moves the flame from left to right in front of my eyes. I can feel the reflexive tug of my eyes wanting to follow, but I keep looking dead ahead.

With a flick and click, the lighter closes.  
"Increase orienting reflexes." the guy instructs. He sounds like a doctor.

I hear a few taps on the keyboard of a laptop.  
"Done." says whoever was doing the typing.

The guy flicks on the flame again, and this time my eyes do follow.  
For good measure, he moves it up and then down. I try to resist and make my eyes take a look around the room, but they're firmly fixed on the lighter.

"Good." he concludes, clicking the lighter shut again and slipping it into his coat, "Keep his reflexes on combat level for today. This one has an errand to run."  
He takes a step back and looks down. Maybe checking out my cock. Fucking pervert.

I would only need a second, maybe two, to get my teeth into his jugular and let it spray into my throat.

I know what that feels like now.  
Peter's eyes. I remember how yellow Peter's eyes were. So close that they could only look past me. His breath was so hot. The vargulf.

This is what it must be like. Trapped in a body.  
One that I don't control anymore.

Christ, I'm crying again.

Everything's gone to shit. I don't even know where it stopped making sense.

But Peter's out there and somebody needs to help him.  
Somebody has to help him, so he doesn't stay like this. He'll die if I don't tell somebody. He doesn't even have to see me. I don't give a shit, he doesn't have to know.

Okay, maybe that's not true. I want him to know.. that I want him to be okay. Is that selfish?  
It's not for my sake. It is, but it isn't.  
I mean.. it can't all have been for nothing. It was everything.

A sick tremor leaks into my stomach.

I'm so fucking scared.  
Gotta stay sharp. Make my heart steel.

They switch me off again.

++

**GODFREY TOWER**

A company is a lot like a chicken.  
You can tell when it has been decapitated.

Sure, there are people on the floor. Phones are ringing, a bit more than usual. Plenty of chatter at the espresso machine.

If you didn't work here, you probably wouldn't sense that there was anything amiss.

But the suits at Godfrey Tower are having their second emergency meeting of the day. They know they're bleeding out.

Every day, right up until his disappearance, Roman Godfrey had locked all the accounts at 5.30 and opened them up again the next morning at 9.  
But he hasn't been seen for a week now, leaving the company finances encrypted.  
Even the more tech-savvy accountants haven't managed to crack them open.

There's panic. None of the suits at the long table can adequately hide it.  
Who could blame them? Everything has been changing really fast since Roman took the helm.  
He took hold in an unprecedented way, breathed down the necks of all who wouldn't surrender control to him immediately.

Roman's reign must have caused a bump in Hemlock Grove's dry-cleaning profits from all the sweat that patched his employees' otherwise crisp white shirts.

At first, people were a little relieved that their bright-eyed CEO didn't clock in.  
But now everyone can feel the chokehold.  
Efforts to contact his mother and predecessor Olivia haven't turned up anything either.

On top of all that, the underground labs are a mess.  
Doctor Blinsky has refused to share many details, except that he is working hard to restore them to operationality.

Of course there has been strong speculation that all these troubles are linked.  
Roman had been seen taking the elevator down more frequently than up, increasingly so.  
Surely he has something to do with whatever went down at S5.

There. All caught up with the espresso machine gossip.

This is today.  
The front door of Godfrey Tower swings open and Roman Godfrey paces his way into the main hall with long strides.  
His shoes softly clack on the white floor as he makes his way to the elevators.

Employers stop their chatter as they catch sight of him, grateful to be spared his gaze.

They can't quite stop their eyes from following him, perhaps fearing another one of his infamous outbursts.

But those deceptively rosy lips remain tightly sealed.  
Some people breathe a sigh of relief when he comes to a halt in front of the elevator door.

Wordlessly, the CEO of Godfrey Industries presses the UP button.

It is only when he steps in and the doors slide completely shut behind him, that the chatter on the floor continues, albeit in whispers.

++

**ROMAN**

I remember the first time I went up in this elevator.

I was 4 and father held my hand. And I was looking up at the numbers, the ones that tell you what storey you're at.  
It's one of those extremely smooth-running, almost completely silent elevators.  
The numbers flashed by so quickly that they became totally insignificant. They meant nothing. I was disappointed.

Right now, I'm wondering whether whoever is controlling my body feels bummed out by that memory.

I've been thinking some real disgusting stuff at them. Things I've done and seen. Or just shit I made up.  
I can feel my skin, so if there's any kind of twitch or a wince, I should notice.

Top floor. Here we are.  
Doors open.  
I take a left and I guess I'm heading straight to my office.

When I open the door, there's a small crowd of suits and nerds gawping at me with my folders in their hands. Two of them are sitting behind my laptop.  
They all look like their sister just walked in on them while they've got their dick in their hand.

One of the suits is the first to stammer into action. I know his name. Curran.  
He moves around the desk and comes at me, unable to make up his mind whether his hands should be defensively palms up or patronisingly palms down.

\- "Mister Godfrey. We.."  
\- "Leave." my voice says.

Curran opens his mouth, hesitates, turns to the rest of them, looking for support.  
But the geeks at my laptop are already quietly unplugging their USB stick.

\- "We didn't.." he tries.  
\- "Get out." my voice insists.  
Whoever's doing this is being more patient than I would've been.

Curran makes some gesture and everybody makes a tight-lipped exit, uncomfortably easing past me on their way out.

When the last of them is gone, I see my hands lock the door and my legs take me to my desk and my ass sits down.

I look at the screen of the laptop. No open windows. They obviously closed everything when I came in.  
My hand takes the mouse and I watch the pointer move to the accounting icon.  
Click.

It asks me for my thumbprint.  
My thumb presses onto the little scanning pad just below the keyboard.

Then it asks for my password.  
How would they know that? I change it every few weeks or whenever I'm feeling antsy. I clear my mind, just in case.  
Oh never fucking mind. My fingers just finished typing in the right password ("donkeydick") and I've just surrendered full access to the company's financial jugular to some blue-eyed tweed shitbag.

Oh fuck oh fuck, he's gonna bury the company or I don't know what, but it's not gonna be good. Fuck you, that's my money. That's for Nadia. And Peter.  
Let me out! Let me out of here! Stop me!

This isn't me!

++

**PETER**

It's slowing down. The wolf needs to stop. At last.

Almost midnight. Dragging bristled fur around the industrial ruins of the steel mill. Don't remember why I came here.

Rusted scrap everywhere.

Whining, I collapse sideways. Front first. Then the rest of the body. A parody of a dog.

I'm so heavy. Everything trembles.  
I think one of my legs is broken, just below the knee.  
Too tired to lift my head and lick it.

Battered concrete cradles the wolf's head.  
But I don't feel the cold pressure on my cheek. I'm trying to escape.

Every body has a mind.  
Every mind has an ego.  
It's a place behind your eyes. An invisible umbilical cord making an it into an I.

Turning back into a human, you feel your ego almost literally moving. It moves to the back of your brain.  
Imagine letting yourself fall backwards off a cliff.

Almost at the same time, the human ego should appear to take its place.

There's a reason why I don't really want this to happen. I don't remember what exactly. Just want to eat and die, but I don't know how to do either thing.  
I guess it's a reflex, this thing that is tightening my spine. The human ego has been drowning, and is clawing up for one last breath.

The wolf lets out a thick bark of a cough and there's dark brown spatters and bone splinter.  
It almost yanks me back to the front of the long skull, but I lean away from the ego and into the fall.

Pounding in my muscles and veins. The marrow in my spine is boiling.

My name is Peter.  
Oh... yes, I think I feel it. I think I know where I am.

Somewhere in  
here.

The smashed body of the wolf suffocates me like a sleeping bag without a zipper.  
So I stretch my arms where arms should be.  
But there's resistance.  
The wolf jerks as I punch through a tunnel of ribs.  
My fingers push down organs and I howl when I rip myself out of my throat.

I kick at the teeth that nip and scrape my ankles until I'm finally free.

The blood on my skin cools almost immediately in the night air. Shivers.  
Exhausted, I stand up.

I look around. This is a place I know.  
This is where I put bacon grease on my face and let another wolf eat it. Along with my face.

My heart makes a sudden, sick pirouette.  
When did this happen? Has it happened yet?  
Startled, I clutch my hands to my nose, my chin, my cheeks. They're all there.

There's no mirrors here. No other reflective surfaces.  
I try to remember the face I lost here. My face.

But all I remember is stone green eyes, lips forever stuck in a girl-like pout, a sharp cut of dark blonde hair.  
I see it all so close.

Begging for his life or his death. I only give what I have to give.  
So close. I see it, smell it.  
Closer even when my jaws open and rip his throat apart, tears still on his cheeks.

That's when something hoarse like glass and gravel comes out of my mouth and my arms twist up to cover my face.  
I remember nothing else for a minute and then I'm squeezing my eyes in my hands until they pop. Claws are pushing up and out. So are the teeth.

When I see Peter Rumancek's face on the floor, I still don't recognize it at all.  
His hair is white.

Chunks of his flesh lie scattered.  
The hunger is enormous, monstrous.

All will pay. Let them all pay for it.  
I turn with a snarl and begin to run.

++

**ROMAN**

The elevator doors open at S5.

I'm all but sure they can read my mind. They got all my accounting passwords right. So no shocker when my hands reach out to the part of the wall that opens up and leads to the hidden laboratories.

I should probably give up trying to tell my muscles to stop all this. All it's given me is a headache that feels like my brain's swimming in piss.

My heart's not beating fast enough. Not at all enough.  
And I'm.. I'm breathing like I'm taking a fucking stroll, but I want to punch the walls. I'm going fucking crazy in here. I want to punch something. My fucking kingdom for a broken knuckle.

Olivia!  
Olivia..!

I know this is her. It's different, but it's her.

Olivia, you fucking whore! Do you hear me?! I'm still here! You syphilitic cunt, I'm fucking done. I'm done. Do you think I don't remember? Do you fucking _want_ me to remember? Coming into my room. Doing that shit to me. You know what you fucking did. You raped me. You raped me, you fucking rapist.  
And then you made me do that shit to Letha.  
Do you think all that will turn me into you?  
Well, here's news for you, bitch.  
The second you close your eyes, I'm going to set myself on fire and you're going to fucking feel it. Your legacy. End of the fucking line.

My heart thuds calmly on.  
It's not mine. Nothing's ever been mine.

Been a slave from the start. Even when I thought I wasn't.  
Who the fuck am I even?  
I was just blank space for her. I was her backup life, still hers to live while she was rotting.

Have I ever done anything that she hasn't.. somehow.. put there?  
Gifts. Triggers.  
I sleepwalked through all of it. And now I'm awake and I still can't stop walking.  
I'm a slave.  
I'm a fucking connect-the-dots.

Congratulations, mother.  
I'm forever in your womb. I'd abort myself, but I can't.

Fuck you. I'm not gonna live like this.  
You can't do this.

Please.

Mother.

I can't.

You can have it. Fucking have my body.  
You ruined everything already. Do whatever the fuck you want.

Peter almost stole me from you, didn't he?  
Ha ha ha.

Peter was mine.  
That was one thing you didn't control. That was me.

I fucked it up, sure.  
But it was me that fucked it up. Maybe you pushed some buttons, tried to get between us. But I pulled that fucking trigger. That was me.  
I fucked it up and I know it's probably.. at least partially.. your doing, but you can't have that. That's on me. I fucked it up.

But it was the best thing I ever had.

Must piss you off.  
That you can never have anything like that. Give anything like that.

What Peter gave.  
That's what life is, Olivia. Don't think I don't know what life is, because that was real life.

I stand in front of the glass door that leads to the main lab.  
My stiff finger enters the access code on the keypad.

A small miracle happens before my legs walk through the door: a tear clouds my left eye.

Mechanically, my hand reaches up and wipes it away.  
Then I step into the lab.

White rabbits in white plastic cages.

++

"All the world will be your enemy, prince with a thousand enemies, and when they catch you, they will kill you.

But first they must catch you."

\- R.A.

++

**GODFREY TOWER**

Roman assumed that the assholes who were controlling his body hadn't found what they were looking for in the laboratory.  
He had watched his hands rip open drawers, smash cabinets, all with distinct purpose.

At one point, he had caught his own reflection. Only for a half second, but it was enough to creep himself out. It was the eyes. He knew he was looking through them, but he saw absolutely nothing of himself looking back.

Also, he was wearing good trousers and a tidy shirt and jacket, none of which he recognized.  
The shoes were the same ones he died in.

Anyway, the assholes hadn't found what they wanted in the lab.

They probably were after some of Pryce's shit.  
Made sense. After what Roman had watched himself do earlier, the lab was the one place in the Tower that theoretically still held any valuable assets.

Roman had just been his own silent witness in basically handing over Godfrey Industries to a company called Cicuta Finit, on a fucking platter. Only took a handful of strategic transactions, set in motion through a few keystrokes and mouse clicks. It had been a disturbingly simple process.

He had felt a little light-headed as he saw his long fingers tap methodically at the laptop's keys.  
It had been weird watching them, as if they weren't his own fingers, and he had absentmindedly observed that he was in need of a manicure.

A brief, high-pitched giggle had echoed in his head when he finally confirmed the transactions by re-entering his password, effectively shutting himself out from the Godfrey billions and surrendering the reigns of the enterprise. All by typing the legend "donkeydick".  
Dad would have been so proud.

Now the employees in the main hall watched him calmly pace towards the exit, a little stiffly, but unmistakably Roman Godfrey.  
Within seconds, the accounting nerds would be the first to cry alarm when they'd notice all the books were suddenly zeroed out.  
Panic. Disbelief. Then more panic.

They would urgently, sweatingly rap on the door of the conference room where the big shots were having their emergency meeting.  
Irritated looks would be shot their way through glass panes.  
Forfeiting all corporate office laws, the lead accounting nerd would barge in without awaiting permission. His face drained, the poor geek would look sick as sour milk. That would be enough for the big shots to know that this meeting was adjourned.

Roman was outside by then, looking out at the woods just across the meadow.  
It was a beautiful day. Birds and buzzing insects. The air thick with pollen.

A mosquito insisted on serenading his right ear before settling on the side of his neck.  
The knowledge that his body was not his to control crossed paths in his brain with his instinct to slap the bug dead.  
The result was a minute twitch in his lower arm, just below the elbow.

His spirit was momentarily piqued by the twitch, though he knew it was going to take more than a mosquito for him to get his will back.

Eyes are the windows of the soul, according to some hippie douche.  
Well, Roman's windows came with bars now.

The mosquito was done with him and buzzed off.  
His body started walking. Uphill, towards the woods.

The closer he came to them, the denser the scent of pine filled the air.  
Until it enveloped him.

His eyes shifted here and there, peering among the trees.  
Little snaps of twig. Not so much bird flutter now.

Roman felt his nostrils flare. He realized that he was hunting.

++

**THE WOODS**

If you ever felt like hunting near Hemlock Grove, you didn't necessarily have to enter the woods in order to encounter game.

The Godfrey family had purposefully chosen not to raze the area with asphalt and concrete. The thick green veil surrounding their buildings formed a welcome shield against prying eyes.  
Many tribes in the Amazon had gone undiscovered for centuries like this.  
If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for Pennsylvania.

Other things hid in these woods too.  
Animals, of course.  
But also a handful of people. Often those who didn't quite belong in the town, but didn't belong anywhere else either.

Some of the people and animals found an unusual lure in the Godfrey Tower, especially at night, when its moon-like light drew them out like moths.

By day, it still held an odd attraction. Maybe because it was basically a huge pillar planted in the middle of nowhere. It called to something primal. It perhaps even tickled the instinct to worship.

In Peter Rumancek's vargulf, it mostly stirred uncontrollable rage.  
This wasn't just the common bloodlust associated with any vargulf. Peter's rage was caused by a loss that couldn't be accepted, one that he could only run from.

So he ran, twisting and snapping his teeth at nothing.  
Sometimes he let out a long, low whine, which was as close as he got to a howl. Obviously, there was nothing triumphant about it. It was the sound of something that begged for death.

But the wolf didn't let him throw himself in front of a truck. The wolf only survived. And so it dragged Peter on and on, through spitting sun and laughing moon.

A half-sane part of him had managed to get the wolf to chew up some of the poisonous hemlock flowers that grew around the bark of trees.  
That only slowed its body down enough to drag itself to the steel mill, stomach cramping and heaving.

And then it spit him out, only to swallow him again.

So that wasn't any good, because with every change, more memories got blurred out. He was mixing up faces and words. By now, he was convinced that he had shot his cousin Destiny in the back of the head, except her face kept looking at him throughout.

She talked to him sometimes. He knew it was a hallucination, but weren't hallucinations real?  
Mostly, she just smiled. Especially when he did that low whine thing.

Fucking terrified him.  
All those flecks of white froth among the leaves. Shivers. Hair on his stomach matted with cold sweat.  
He felt like his legs were filled with ants.

His head jerked up.

The wolf smelled something that turned Peter's stomach.  
It was a good smell once. Now it was bad.  
He had made it all bad.

And so the wolf's lips drew back. Not at the smell, but at the memory.  
His hot urine spilled among the leaves, creating little rivers.  
Peter knew the memory, of course. It swam to the surface among the vargulf's seething mire of instinct and impulse.  
But it was blurry, like everything, just like he needed it to be. Neither roses, nor thorns. It was all piss.

He was standing still, which was bad.  
_Keep moving._ Every pink muscle in his body told him to keep moving.  
Away from the smell and definitely away from the memory.

All he had to do was turn.  
Run into the densest part of the woods and thrash and howl until he could forget again.

His claws dug into the soil and his shoulders tensed, but Peter did not move.  
The instinct to run was so overwhelming that it made him look all crooked.  
The yellow of his eyes had all but swallowed his pupils. And only the teeth on one side of his face were showing. It looked grotesque, as if the wolf was having a stroke.  
His face was as trapped as the rest of his body.

The wolf had to run. But Peter had to see.  
And that is how he was found.

Roman's long legs pushed up over the dead-leaf-covered hill, and he halted as soon as he caught sight of the wolf.  
It looked straight back at him, trembling rabidly.

Its fur was white, but stuck out in tufts of grime and dried blood.

Olivia had once taken little Roman to an animal pound. Some place that looked more like a junkyard. It stank.  
There were mostly dogs. A few cats too. All in cages, many of them packed together. Most of them were missing fur and had sores instead, on their legs or on their backs or both.  
Olivia had told him to pick a puppy. Her smile taut, barely perceptible.  
Little Roman just stood there and shook his head. Picking one meant dooming all the others. She pushed him for a choice a few more times, until his eyes clouded over and he stopped protesting. Then she smiled and took him home. It was only later, in his room, that he cried.

Yes, this was Peter.

For the first few seconds, Roman felt as blank inside as his vacant eyes looked.  
Then he was uncontrollably happy for a moment. Peter was alive! He was a wolf and he was white, which probably meant that he was a vargulf. But he was alive!  
His mind laughed, cried, roared at the bounds that kept it from physical expression.

Then he felt how his hands became fists and his relief quickly was flushed out by an anxious realization. His body hadn't walked into these woods by chance. This was never going to be a friendly encounter.

_Peter. Oh no. Oh shit. No no no. Peter, run. This is not me. Run. Don't look. Run away. If I get out of this, I'll find you and you can kill me again for all I care, but now you gotta fucking trust me and run._

His mind squirmed, kicked, shouted every protest it could throw at his body's nervous system.  
But he did not budge.  
He was a statue, dressed up and disguised as himself, standing some twenty feet away from the wolf.

Roman knew his body was here to kill. He was familiar with the tension in his limbs, knew what it meant.

And what if he succeeded?  
Roman had often been frightened by his own strength. Especially when he was pissed off. The anger, the adrenaline made him feel like he could punch through concrete.

Oh god, what if he was about to kill Peter right here and there was nothing he could do but watch while he ripped him apart?

If his emotions hadn't been mostly cut off from his body, Roman would have felt his heart lurch queasily in his chest.  
What he did feel was his hand calmly slip into his jacket, where the heft of a small pistol found his palm. Probably not a regular gun, Roman figured.

He tried so goddamned hard to send something out at Peter. A sign. A glimmer in his eyes. But these eyes steadfastly refused to focus on anything but tactical advantage.  
Roman's body took a step sideways, and another. He was circling the wolf.

The wolf recognized the threat, the simple truth of it.  
It growled, low and menacing.

_No no no, Peter, there's a gun, there's a gun in my hand. Run the fuck away from me. I can't stop. I don't know what's in the gun. Run away._

Peter didn't hear anything but the snaps of twigs and the brush of leaves under his and Roman's footsteps.  
Could this be real? No, no way. This was another hallucination. But it felt realer than the others.

He had seen Roman before, and Destiny, and mother. But those moments had felt like fever dreams. Their voices never came from their mouths, but from inside his head.  
And they vanished whenever the wolf snapped at them...

This was not like that. And it smelled like whatever used to be good to him. Something he could curl up into.  
Even if this wasn't Roman, it was enough to make Peter recoil.

But then the vargulf's rage pushed through his veins, furiously crushing down rational thoughts and doubts.  
As always, it felt magnificent. Full surrender. Becoming everything that there ever was to fear, while fear itself meant nothing but joy and blood.

His legs tensed.  
The wolf was ready to leap forward and rip this Roman-thing's ribcage out.

The wolf let out a snarl and Roman felt it in his gut, like the bass in a club.  
Roman's hand was still inside his jacket, but he continued to wait. Did the hunter want Peter to make the first move?

Roman was aware of his own eye movements. Whoever was pulling his optical nerves was meticulously reading the body language of the vargulf.  
Probably the foxhunter guy. The tweed had not just been for show.

Another low, guttural growl.  
Most people would have been reduced to a jelly-fingered mess of terror by the sound alone.

Still, it was bark rather than bite.  
The vargulf relied on abandon, instinct and savagery. Its eyes, its desire and its muscles were to be one harmonious whole if it were to take the leap and tear the Roman-thing's stomach right out of its abdomen.

But there was a tension in its legs, in its neck and shoulders, that prevented its full body from locking into that lethal single-mindedness.

That was because Peter wanted to get the hell out of here, out of this weird encounter.  
He didn't trust himself. Trusted the wolf even less.  
Whether it was a hallucination or not, he couldn't look at the Roman-face. He already knew life could be worse than death, because nothing in life made sense. Everything turned to shit. Everything.  
So he chose death. He'd given up.  
And now - even now - life was here to dangle its lies in front of his nose again.  
Looking like what he thought he knew. He missed it so much.  
He couldn't fucking deal with it. But he'd already ripped it to shreds once. There was nothing left. His jaws were tired. His teeth ached.  
Too many tears in the adrenaline. He just wanted to disappear.

Roman also knew something was off. And he also knew that the hunter knew, and that was something that worried him sick.

Then the mistake happened.  
Succumbing to the sadness that crept through its veins, cloudings its senses, the wolf made a half-turn towards the trees. Peter's uncertainties had chewed away at its bloodjoy and it was ready to forfeit this encounter.

Roman's hand lashed out like a viper and squeezed the trigger.  
There was a sound like a sharp puff of air.  
The wolf whined in surprise and jerked its body back into attack mode.  
A dart stuck out of its flank.

_Oh god. Oh god. Oh no._

Roman was certain his mind alone was going to have a heart attack.  
Was it poison? Was it a tranquilizer?

He was walking over towards the wolf now, dropping the gun among the leaves.

The wolf was stumbling, curling in on itself.  
Whatever was in the dart was taking effect immediately.

_Get up! Get up, Peter!_

Roman's body didn't listen. His legs marched right up to the wolf, which could barely stand now. It swayed drunkenly on its legs, a breath away from collapsing.

_Oh fuck oh please Peter get up get up get up!_

He stood over the wolf now. Roman's jaw unlocked and his mouth began to open.  
He didn't feel any of the rush - the bloodlust, supposedly - that he felt when he went into this state. All he could think of was that he looked like a horrible monster with a gaping mouth looming over the spasming form of what was still Peter somewhere inside.

As he dropped to his knees, he could smell the dirt clotted on the fur.  
He witnessed the wolf's struggles quickly dying down to trembles and shakes.  
Peter was in pain. Roman saw the wolf's snout stretching upward in a primitive reflex, a bid for escape. And with that, it also exposed Peter's throat.

Roman lowered his mouth, hands ready to push the wolf down in case it still struggled too fiercely.  
Roman felt himself salivating.

_I'm sorry! I'm sorry!_

His mind went white as he bit down hard, between the shoulder and the neck.  
Then harder when the wolf let out a choked squeal of a whine.  
The first warm squirt of red coated the roof of his mouth.

Roman felt his own self race way, way back to the back of his head, deaf and reeling with shock.

Time slowed down.  
Things started to float.  
He became a vacuum.

A few seconds even disappeared entirely.

When he returned to his consciousness, dumb with horror, Roman felt his own mouth tug at the wound.

_No. Stop. Stop._

Peter whined. His back legs kicked weakly. But that only made the blood pool quicker onto Roman's tongue.

Maybe he wouldn't need to jump in front of a truck after all, Peter thought.  
He struggled, but his muscles felt so fucking heavy. And the dart was hurting like a whole nest of hornets were sharing a single stinger.  
Anyway, he always figured death would hurt.

A lock of Roman's hair insistently brushed against Peter's brow. He was getting light-headed.  
This couldn't really be happening.

But a jet of his blood went straight to the back of Roman's gaping mouth, and down his throat.

_Oh.. Peter.._

It tasted so good that Roman was shocked into enjoying it.  
Copper and apple juice.

_Peter._

His heart gave a painfully violent throb. Enough to tear an artery.  
Something was pushing. Something was happening.

A tingling feeling ran from his neck down. A little pack of electrons racing through his nerves, finding their way past the knot of his left shoulder, past the skinny jut of his elbow, down to his wrist.

And then, a small spasm ran through Roman's left hand.  
Enough to flick his fingernail against the plastic casing of the dart.

_Did I..?_

Roman felt a jolt of incredulous elation.  
With a wild swipe of the left hand, Roman batted the dart out of Peter's flank and sent it flying.

But he didn't feel at all free yet.  
Felt like he was trying to mind-control a very disobedient living mannequin.

Pulses. Counter-pulses.

Letting rage overcome his fear, Roman managed to send just enough static into his nervous system to make his body loll backwards, off-balance, enough to make his jaw relinquish the wolf's neck.

He staggered back, jerking and contorting. Leaves and twigs crunched under his boots.  
For a fading few seconds, he caught climpses of a room. A mirror. A man with a black cloth draped over his face.  
And that man reached his fingers out to him. The fingers were long and growing longer. Far longer than possible. Roman heard their army of knuckles cracking as they crept over him, under his skin.

And soon his limbs and his back straightened, and he felt his body dulling again.  
Tears were in his eyes.  
He knew the rebellion was over.  
And the foxhunter turned him towards Peter again.

Except, to Roman's vertiginous relief, Peter wasn't there anymore.

But the hunter already jerked Roman's eyes to the ground and spotted the blood that streaked the leaves, as well as a distinct drag mark.  
A slight sigh of exasperation passed his lips; the first thing the hunter had done through his host body that wasn't purely transactional. Inside, Roman felt a small twinge of satisfaction. Yes, the cocknose in tweed was irritated.

But the drag mark didn't look that promising. How far could Peter have gone? He had had his back turned for only seconds.

Roman's hand slipped into his jacket again. This time, it smoothly retrieved a hunting knife.

_Fuck. Keep running, Peter. I'm sorry. So sorry, man. I swear I'll get these fuckers. This is fucked. Everything's been fucked for way long. We gotta stop this. But I dunno if I can control myself. Can't let 'em do this. And I.. and I don't know why he didn't use this knife till now. Some kind of bullshit hunter's honor thing? I don't fucking know. Just keep running. I'll try to slow him down, but I dunno if I can._

Cautiously, but with swift determination, the hunter moved his legs forward, following a trail of blood spots into the denser part of the woods.

Roman tried to focus on the taste of Peter's blood still sticking to the back of his tongue. If that's what got him his body back for a moment, then maybe it could happen again?  
But that had been a whole lot of blood in one go. And anyway, the hunter would think twice now about using Roman's bite to finish the job. It was knife time.

Carefully using the knife to push away overhanging pine branches that blocked his view, the Roman-thing stalked onward.  
The blood trail suddenly got a lot thicker. And there were two large chunks of fur.  
The hunter paused and stared at them. Then he turned Roman's eyes up and scanned the environment meticulously before slowly moving on.

More chunks, thicker now, with skin and muscle layers.  
Then viscera.

_Holy shit. He's changed back._

Roman's head raced with all the images of Peter post-change that he had witnessed.  
One good thing was that he never seemed to have a scratch on him. He got, like, a reset whenever he became him again.  
But then Peter would be totally wrecked, every time. He'd sleep on the couch for half the day.

An obscenely curious and superficial voice chattered away in the back of Roman's mind. Like, did Peter have Gandalf hair now..?

The hunter paused again.

A big pile of steaming red flesh was at the end of the trail.  
No naked gypsy in sight though.

Roman's eyes shifted to the left and to the right, narrowing as they scanned the bushes.  
His head tilted and turned. The hunter was listening.

But the woods remained quiet, so he cautiously took two steps forward and nudged the heap of discarded wolf with the nose of his boot.  
Then Roman's eyes turned to the floor and the hunter inspected the cracked leaves and twigs.  
Roman himself saw it too. You didn't have to be a foxhunter to make out the scattered, lopsided trail that led further into the trees.

And so he followed.

The sun was getting low and some of the summertime birds had started to go home.  
Nowhere near dark yet, but Roman knew that the hunter would want to finish this while they were still on the right side of dusk.

Roman kept sending as much static through his own brain as he could, still trying to mess with his own basic faculties, but his mind was wretchedly tired. He couldn't even get a twitch out of his own eyelid.  
The hunter had let the leash slip once and clearly didn't intend on letting it happen again. Roman had been carefully bricked up in the back of his own head.

_Goddammit, Peter, run. Or hide somewhere. Just don't.. don't try to fight. This guy's got a fucking hardon for this shit. Stay the fuck away from him._

At least Roman felt that his pulse had quickened. Not much, just a gentle trot. Tweedledick was still very cool and collected and in control.

His fingers gripped the knife with a confident looseness.  
Eyes to the ground, he spotted more leaves and twigs that were flipped over, snapped or otherwise disturbed. Yes. Peter was weak and out of time. He couldn't cover his tracks.

To the right, something made a brief rustling sound, but it was probably a pinecone dropping. The hunter calmly turned that way and scanned the shrubs. Pretty yellow flowers waved among the green. Nothing person-sized there.  
And the trail continued ahead anyway.  
So the hunter pressed on in that direction. Ears, eyes, everything tight like a rubber band.

Roman found himself trying to put himself in Peter's place. What he ought to do in order to stay out of sight. But then Roman stopped himself, remembering the hunter was listening on the inside too.

His feet stopped.  
The trail ended. Right next to a large, densely-grown, gnarled white oak tree.  
Roman's eyes looked up, peering among the broad, green leaves. A good hiding place. But also a dead end.

The hunter lightly ran Roman's thumb over the knife's edge and with his other hand, he reached into his jacket.

_Just how much shit do you carry in there? What are you, Inspector Gadget?_

This time, it was a whistle, made of ivory or maybe bone.  
Roman's hand brought it to his lips. It felt smooth and warm.  
When he blew, it didn't make any sound that Roman's ears could hear.  
But he blew it for a good five seconds.

_Is this some kind of dog whistle? Think he's gonna come and roll over for you?_

Roman's thoughts were mostly just a nervous running commentary now. He kept repeating lines and words like a mantra echoing around the little chamber that he had left of his mind. Anything to fill up the creeping, waiting silence that was sucking out his stomach and tying knots in his spine.  
He wanted to laugh. It was insane, but it felt like the thing to do.

A second time, he blew the whistle. A bit longer now.  
And the oak leaves responded with a rustle up above.

It hadn't been a bad idea for Peter to change into human shape. Wolves couldn't climb trees. Creatures with thumbs could.

The hunter squinted at his prey, looking for the off-white of human skin among the green, yellow and bark brown.

And so the hunter's pupils were unprepared and couldn't even find the time to accomodate the sudden rush of white, snarling fur that leapt straight down on top of him, knocking him to the ground with such force that he didn't understand which way he was facing.

Behind his stolen body's eyes, Roman gasped with pain. He tried to fill his lungs to scream, but they still did not obey him. Something tore at him, at his legs, then at his chest.  
And he realized the vargulf - Peter - was standing on him, at least with two or three strong paws that crushed his ribs and mauled his limbs just by putting weight and claws upon them.

It was too close to his face to form one complete picture. All Roman could see was fur, teeth, a yellow eye.  
His muscles tensed furiously, but his arms and legs wouldn't budge.

_Peter, wait! They're fucking with us, Peter! If there's anything left of that psycho link... between you and me... please fucking listen!_

He felt the hunter trying to keep his chin down to protect the softness of his throat.  
That's where Peter bit him first, the last time. He couldn't really remember the pain. It had felt very wet and hot. And he remembered teeth scraping against something hard inside him, like bone or something.

_Oh please please I don't want I don't want it again Peter I'm sorry I love you I don't know I didn't know I couldn't please stop please stop_

The wolf didn't stop.  
As if the Roman-thing's shirt and skin were one thing, his teeth sank through both layers and got to work.

 _Oh god oh oh no no Peter no Peter_  
_Peter_  
_oh that fucking hurts_  
_oh fuck_  
_Peter_  
_I'm so_

The blood came.  
First a thin spray.  
Then a smoothly rolling river, as dark as a cherry, which split into many little brooks that went everywhere.  
The trees waited.  
Flowers watched with envy.

When the tearing began, Roman was already fading.  
The last thing he saw was Peter's teeth, raw and long, pulling something long, thin and black from the hole of his chest.

++

"My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today."

\- R.A.

♫ _IAMX - I Am Terrified_


	2. Episode 2: The Safe Way Home

**THE WOODS**

Jeri's mom and dad had told her not to take the shortcut, but the sun was still out and she was late and nobody was going to find out.

She liked the sound and the feeling of the leaves, crackling and snapping under her trainers.

It was even better in the fall. She and Malena would wade through brown and red leaves that reached up past their ankles.  
Malena's folks had banned her from going near the woods altogether. And sure, her folks had a right to freak out. But... it was never going to be Jeri or Malena found dead and dismembered, was it? Even in a pretty small place like Hemlock Grove, victims were other people.  
Anyway, Jeri was careful and packed a kick and she could outrun anyone.

On top of that, the "safe" way home led past at least two, no, three creepy alleys that parents should probably go insane about instead.

Jeri did make a mental note to not forget to kick the soil and any stray leaves from her shoes before she got into the house.

She slowed down to look at a squirrel that was clutched to a tree. Cute little guy.  
It was just there, upside down, looking for nuts or something.

Jeri made a chattery chipmunk noise at it and, quick as a heartbeat, it flipped the other way 'round and shot up the tree, among the leaves.  
She followed it with her eyes, hoping to catch another look or maybe see if it had babies or something.

There was some rustling and then something.. flappy fell down. It slipped past the branches until it fell into a flappy pile on the ground.

"The hell..?" Jeri squinted.  
She got a little closer, while the squirrel watched, happy to no longer be the focus of attention.

It looked like a weird-coloured raincoat or something. With a fur collar.  
Jeri frowned and a cold shiver closed her throat.

Among the folds, which were skin-coloured on one side and deep red on the other, an eye was staring back at her.

It was a blue eye. But there was so much white that it looked as shocked to see her as she was to see it.  
Jeri took a stiff step back and made a sound: "Uh.."  
Then she looked around the woods, like she was expecting some helpful attendant to step up and explain this to her.

Suddenly, all her parents' and the principal's warnings became very real indeed, and she remembered there was barely any mobile coverage out in this part.  
So she settled for taking a picture. The first one she took from too far, so she got closer and took another while trying not to look directly at the folded pile of skin and hair.  
Still, she glimpsed the white gleam of the eyeball again, and she couldn't stop a wild tremble from creeping up her arm. "Fuck this.." she whispered and took a wide berth when she walked around it and continued down the path home.

At first, she walked at a steady pace.  
She looked back after half a minute, without stopping.  
Then she started walking faster.  
The second time she looked back, she thought she could hear something moving the leaves, and she started to run.

Jeri didn't look back again as she ran all the way home.

It wasn't until she was standing in the kitchen, staring into the infinite whiteness of the fridge, that she realized that she had forgotten to kick the dirt and leaves off her sneakers.

++

**THE WOODS**

The wolf had dragged the Roman-thing into a leaf-filled ditch and now it didn't know what to do. It didn't even know why it hadn't finished tearing up the Roman-thing's chest.  
It still wanted to. Oh how it wanted to.

Peter shivered. He was hearing voices everywhere and couldn't figure out which he should listen to. The wolf was whining at him, whimpering with confusion, demanding an explanation for its erratic behaviour. His mother was telling him a story about Uncle Vince, but it didn't make any sense. Destiny just smiled at him, but her teeth were those of a wolf.

Roman was the only one who was quiet. "The Roman-thing" he corrected himself. This pale thing lying here at his paws was not Roman. Nothing was Roman anymore.  
It hurt him to think the name. Something dead that belonged to bad memories.

The vargulf licked Peter's neck, leaned its warm fur into his chest, promising a shorter way home. It didn't want Peter to suffer. All it wanted for him was death.

But Peter had recognized the long black hair that his teeth had pulled out of the Roman-thing's heart. That was a really old trick that he had heard Nicolae talk about. Kinda like gypsy voodoo. The owner of the hair becomes the owner of the body, once it's woven in.

Peter tried to talk to himself, just to keep the other voices out.  
So much shit had happened this year. Too much at once. Everyone had been pushing, pushing him. Pushing him around until he was dizzy and impulsive.  
But if this... this nightmare... is the result of something that somebody had elaborately orchestrated for him.. for him and Roman... all the pushing, all the bad shit that had happened... then maybe this mess wasn't all because of him. Not _all_ of it.

The vargulf whined, pawed at his shoulders. Peter ignored it.  
What was on the other end of the string?

He was in the dark, naked, inside the wolf.  
The black hair was twined around his finger. He pulled until it pulled back.  
Peter started to follow it with his hands, and it was so long, much longer than it looked.  
He crawled, walked, crawled again. The hair led him up, down, in circles.  
Until there was a little bit of light. Peter followed the hair. It had cut into his fingers by now.

When the light got brighter, he looked down and saw the hair had become the tautly stretched, scaled body of a serpent.  
Peter's heart leapt and he let go.

The darkness exploded and he woke up startled in the leaf-filled ditch.

Disoriented, he tried to stand up before he realized that he was still a wolf.

Roman was lying before him, pale as death. Peter sniffed him.  
Pale, but not dead.

Carefully, he bit down on Roman's jacket and began to drag him up, out of the ditch.

The bleeding got worse. Better not to move him, whispered some sensible voice in his head.  
The vargulf licked its lips expectantly. "No," Peter told it.

With one more tug, Roman's body was out of the ditch and now lay motionless among the leaves. Peter let go of the jacket and turned his head left and right, looking for some kind of direction.

He was exhausted. His legs trembled under him. The vargulf had worn out his muscles and bones every day and every night, till there was nothing left. Everything hurt. Everything was spinning. But he had to think.

Peter paced back and forth, his eyes never straying from Roman's body.  
How strange humans were, only walking on half of their legs.

He scratched himself and noticed that the moon was already visible in the day blue sky. It was almost full.  
And it reminded him of the tower.

He thought of other things too, but his mind kept spiralling around the image of the tower, looming white over all of Hemlock Grove.  
It had always pulled at Peter, also when he was wolf. Some places were like magnets. People built temples there. Elephants lay down at its foundations to fall into the forever sleep.

And with no other reasonable ideas coming to him, Peter started dragging Roman's body across the rustling leaves, in the direction of the tower.

Behind his eyes, the vargulf raged, kicked and foamed, but Peter didn't let go.  
He kept dragging, all the while breathing hotly through his nostrils.

After eight minutes, he froze when his eyes strayed across the wound in Roman's chest and the vargulf leapt to the front of his mind and suggested he dig his mouth in there and tug out all of the intestines until he could see right through to Roman's spine.

Peter's mind hung on like soap-slippery hands. He couldn't remember anything good. He had nothing to throw back at the vargulf.  
His only reply was silence.  
Furious, minute after minute, second after second, the vargulf demanded an explanation. It spat at him, howled, eventually begged.  
Peter ignored it, though he wanted to tear its throat out just to make it shut up.

He kept dragging.  
Roman wasn't the slightest bit pudgy, but he was tall and those long bones made his body heavy. Especially when he had to be dragged uphill.  
Ten minutes later and Peter's jaw was hurting.

He didn't stop. The wolf's muscles were stiff with rage and he was blind with ripping and disemboweling impulses.  
He ignored them all, even though that wasn't possible.  
He clung to nothing. All that counted was the next tug, another half yard up the path.  
And with every few of those yards, he felt more like he was doing something very important.

At one point, a root sticking out of the earth scraped Roman's face, and Peter stopped abruptly and his ears tilted forward in puzzled conflict.  
Gently, he let go of the jacket's collar and moved his snout to inspect the scrape.  
The sharp end of the root had left a dirty, earth-engrained cut right down Roman's cheek.

Blood was welling up already, like water slowly pushing up through flooded soil. Peter sniffed the blood. He was so fucking hungry. With the vargulf pushed back, his body's basic needs were making themselves felt again.  
He licked his lips with dry tongue.

He sniffed again, closer. Then Peter whined and drew his snout back abruptly without taking his eyes off Roman.  
Right now, this was the only face that he knew. It might as well be his own.  
Sure felt more like it than the white-haired mask he'd left on the cold floor of the mill.

He had watched Roman sleep, more times than one.  
Once it had been the bad kind of sleep, one Roman couldn't wake up from. Yeah, that had really happened.  
Fuck, he was remembering. The heart under the wolf's ribcage lurched with surprised recognition.

One time, Peter had woken up from a dream and couldn't go back to sleep, so he went to have a piss and when he came back, he found Roman muttering stuff, while his eyes moved a little under their lids.  
And Peter had tried to listen, but he couldn't make out anything much, so he just got back in bed and closed his eyes and tried to imagine the things Roman might be dreaming.  
How he had wished he was Destiny at that moment.

The wolf made an odd sound between a bark and a cough and Peter realized he had just let out a laugh.

He remembered Roman laughing. Sometimes as a restrained sputter, when something wasn't really that funny, but Roman couldn't help it and it made his cheeks red because it kinda embarassed him that he was laughing at stupid shit.  
And when something really was unequivocally hilarious, Roman would let out a high-pitched giggle, which _also_ kinda embarassed him, but he wouldn't be giving a shit and he laughed till he got hiccups.

Peter restlessly paced back and forth as the memories seeped through, not knowing what the hell to make of them.  
Until they became too much and he tilted his head up and let out a short, stammering, broken howl, and then immediately bowed down with trembling forelegs, down to Roman's face and he licked the cut clean.

He tasted the dirt and the blood on his tongue. Mixed together, those were the communion and the price for passing down the wrong way of the river of death.

After he was done, Peter stood over Roman's face, looking at it, paralyzed with the shocking smoothness of that skin, while he whimpered with the ache and confusion that came from clarity.  
Seconds passed, and seconds counted.  
With a gruff sound of determination, he jolted back into action and quickly took the tough lapel of the jacket in his mouth and continued tugging Roman's weight up the path of leaves.

His legs shook with every backwards step until he didn't notice. Peter kept going, forgetting about muscles, tendons, bones as his thoughts swirled and boiled.  
By all means, he should have collapsed and not woken for days, weeks, but he was running on different fuel now.

Destiny had read an article to him about the brain and electromagnetism, how all the traffic inside somebody's skull could be heard from the outside, if you had the right equipment.  
He had watched Roman sleep and, after a minute and another, he had brought his forehead very close to Roman's, almost touching. And he had listened.

Down into the valley, as dusk started to powder the sky, the bleeding cushions of the wolf's feet touched asphalt.  
Peter dragged Roman's lukewarm body across the road towards the stairs leading up to the entrance of Godfrey Tower.

++

**GODFREY TOWER**

Most of the daytime employees of The Godfrey Institute had gone home already, worried about their future, what to tell their spouses.

Receptionist Ben Spinks had just clocked out and was trudging towards the double-doored exit.  
He had promised his girlfriend that they'd go skiing this weekend, but now that was the last thing he felt like doing with his spare time.

Halfway to the doors, he dropped his book ( _Tropic Of Cancer_ by Henry Miller, a secondhand paperback).  
If he hadn't dropped that book, he would have been a few yards closer to the doors when Peter pushed through them, and Ben might just have pissed himself right there on the shiny white floor.

Instead, he looked up from his kneeling position and saw a stark white, bloodied-mouthed wolf head push the doors open, eyes orange and deeply sad.  
Ben was frozen, his knees useless. His fingers clutched his paperback so hard that his fingernails went pale.

He watched dumb-mouthed as the white wolf pushed one of the doors wide open until it stuck.  
Then the wolf turned and began to drag something inside.

"Hey.." wheezed Ben, really needing somebody else in the lobby to acknowledge the fact that there was a huge white wolf checking in at Godfrey Tower.  
But what few co-workers were still present ambled obliviously from door to door, lost in paperwork and clipboards.  
An intern actually spotted Ben sitting on the floor from the corner of her eye, but took him for another desperate accountant having a breakdown, so she sternly looked ahead and quickened her pace.

The wolf was dragging in a corpse.

"Oh shit" muttered Ben under his breath. His brain felt like a rapidly deflating balloon, but it still managed to inanely regurgitate a bit of helpful trivia: more Americans died in skiing accidents than in wolf attacks.

He huffed air into his lungs and somehow managed to convince his own legs that they were not made of rubber after all. Awkwardly, tremblingly, Ben rose up and waltzed a bizarre, backwards beeline towards the safety of his desk.  
He almost tripped over his own chair, but he stayed up and stiffly groped underneath the desk, finally setting off the silent alarm.

The wolf dragged the corpse halfway towards the center of the lobby and stopped there.  
Ben saw it lean in close to its prey. _Oh Jesus, it's gonna eat him, it's gonna eat his face, oh fuck._

That's when, finally, somebody else saw.  
An accountant came stepping brusquely down the corridor, took one look at the wolf and the body, made a spastic stop and went into a scrambling 180 turn back the way he came.

The wolf didn't take notice of the accountant, but then it did suddenly snap its head up and growled. Security had arrived.  
Two powerfully built guards marched into the corridor. They too halted when they saw the animal standing there.

It gave Ben just enough confidence to make his voice audible.  
"It came in.. It came through the entrance," he called out to the guards, while he pointed to the door.

"Shut up," said one of the guards flatly, eyes glued to the wolf.

Peter could only think of how easy it would be to leap across Roman's body and land teeth first into the guard's pudgy neck.  
But no no no, that was not what he'd come here for...  
He tried hard to think of what he _had_ come here for.  
This wasn't home. Maybe this was a mistake.

The guards pulled their handguns and took aim.

Peter smelled cold sweat. The vargulf liked it. It flowed into his legs, his toes.  
Just one more. One more leap.

_No. No more._

To the guards' confusion and probable disappointment, Peter hung his head, let out a trembling whine and then he turned, curled and lay down by Roman's side, one paw over his stomach.

He didn't know what was going to happen next. The wait that followed was a prayer. Peter had nothing else left.  
Only the next seconds. And Roman.

Peter sighed and it came out a soft, closed-mouthed growl.  
He looked at the pale face by his side. Cold and white-blue.  
If it was too late, Peter promised the vargulf that he would come with and never return.

At the other end of the corridor, an elevator dinged.  
Ben Spinks and everyone else but the guards turned to see who was joining them in this surreal spectacle.

The doors slid open and Doctor Klaus Blinsky, face flushed and labcoat unbuttoned, stepped out.  
"Stop!" he rasped, clearly out of breath, "Nobody shoot. Don't shoot it."

Peter hadn't seen Blinsky before, but if he had, he would have noticed that the doctor's grey stubble had now grown into the humble beginnings of a beard.  
This Blinsky generally had the look of somebody who had been on a bender the night before, but tried to still look somewhat presentable to the mailman.  
The pinkness of his eyelids didn't help there.

As soon as the silent alarm had been triggered, a window with a live security feed had popped up on Blinsky's screen. That had happened twice already this week, but both times it had been an accountant losing his shit and shouting threats.  
Blinsky had already been in the middle of an exasperated sigh and his mouse pointer halfway to the X when he froze and actually looked.

"Just back off. Please. Stand down," he gently scolded and then felt genuinely surprised when the two security guys took a step back. Blinsky could never get used to people actually taking heed of him when he attempted authority.

Encouraged, he tried to crank up the volume a little. Not too much. Pryce never yelled. Pryce would raise his voice, but he never yelled. And people would listen, obey.  
_That's it. Conviction._  
Blinsky cleared his throat.  
"Close the door," he called out, flapping his hand at the main entrance.

The guards, their guns still pointed at the white wolf, glanced at one another and the one standing closest to the entrance visibly cursed and then slowly, warily side-stepped the scene until he could reach out his arm and tip the large door shut.

Blinsky walked up the corridor, slow but trying not to make much of a point of it. Wolves didn't like it when you tried to trick them. They knew.  
Whether it worked the same with werewolves, Blinsky didn't know. He swallowed. _Guess I'm taking one for science here._

He was just five yards away now from the body and the wolf lying by its side.  
He squinted, then froze.  
"Good Lord, it's Roman," he said, not that shocked. "It's Roman Godfrey."

Now the guards squinted, tipping their weapons down just a smidge.  
It was true. Under the dirt and streaks of blood, that was the CEO of Godfrey Industries himself.  
"Jesus," said one of them.

Blinsky hunched down just a little. "Peter," he whispered.  
(Or, possibly, this was some other wolf and he was making a complete fool of himself.)  
No time for doubts now.  
It was a shot in the dark, but Blinsky had heard things, read things... especially in Pryce's journals, the ones that he had to hack into in order to take over the lab work.  
Turned out a good portion of those journals read like crazy, insane, Hammer horror-style gossip. Far too crazy to not be at least a little true.

Blinsky took another step.  
This had better be the Rumancek boy.

"Peter," he said again in a slightly higher tone.  
The wolf moved an ear, then wearily lifted its head to look at him.  
It was a moment that would haunt him.  
At first, Blinsky thought the wolf's eyes were orange, but then he saw they were so bloodshot that their natural yellow colour had become tainted.

Maybe he had expected a "man's best friend" kind of look, the shy kind of eye contact that common mutts gave you; definitely not the still, hollowed-out glare that he found in Peter's eyes.

Doctor Blinsky very slowly bent his knees until he squatted. A deep frown drew itself on his face.  
"Oh.." he mumbled unsteadily.

There was none of the innocence of the animal mind. Whatever terrible thing had happened to this poor creature, it had unfortunately understood all of it.

"Doctor. Sir?" interrupted one of the guards.  
Blinsky ignored him like a fart in the wind.  
He watched the wolf's eyes blink tiredly as it moved its head to rest on Roman's stomach, alongside its own paw.

Blinsky swallowed.  
"Oh you poor boy," he said softly, wishing he could send whatever hope he had directly into the wolf's so clearly broken heart.

In fact, that was exactly the plan.  
The doctor carefully rose back to his feet and pulled a small, bamboo blowpipe out of his white coat.  
Quickly, before he could allow himself to lose nerve, he brought it to his lips and blew, hard and with conviction. With a fluting pop sound, a small, feathered dart appeared in Peter's flank.  
The wolf didn't move a muscle, barely whimpered.

Then Blinsky, along with the guards and the few employees that hadn't run into an office or broom closet, witnessed the next thing that would haunt him for weeks, years, forever.

It happened too quickly to seem real.  
When any of the Institute's staff, days later, ventured to try and recall it, they found that they simply couldn't.  
Suddenly, they were just looking at a naked figure, face down, cramping and jerking on the floor, right where the wolf had been.  
A boy. A man.  
Impossible to tell how old. His body looked young, but with the agonising exhaustion of a Greek statue. White hair matted with sweat.

Ben Spinks watched from behind his desk, mouth open, forgetting to breathe, clutching his Henry Miller.

Blinsky still stood right where he was, closer than anyone else. His fingers wrapped knuckle-tight around the blowpipe.  
Tears had rolled down his face and tried to find their way through the grey coarseness of his beard.

For the first time since Pryce first showed him around the lower laboratories, he felt like praying.

The naked figure was glowing wet with something like sweat.  
Under the skin, some muscles and bones protruded and moved, still finding their place in the configuration of the human body. Blinsky could hear it. Like a giant cracking its knuckles.

The boy himself appeared to have passed out by now. His limbs flopped around on the floor as this internal force wrenched his body into shape from the inside out.  
After some twenty seconds of muffled crunches and pops, the last of the twitches died down and left him lying motionless.

Peter's arm still lay draped over Roman Godfrey's shirt, which was so blook-soaked that it was rust brown.  
The two of them looked like a pair of lovers who had walked down the wrong dark alley in a very bad kind of town.

Then, to Blinsky's relief, Peter's ribs visibly started to lift, forming unsteady breathing motions.

"What.." mumbled one of the guards, then jumped when Peter's head suddenly jerked up like a marionette and let out a groan.  
Blinsky breathed in sharply as Peter craned his neck painfully to look up at him.  
The boy's eyelids peeled open and his eyes were pale blue, of an almost corpse-like translucency, but they were sharp and attentive enough to meet Blinsky's.

Peter's lips moved and Blinsky quickly leaned closer. From them came a voice so hoarse that it was downright guttural, nigh-on unintelligible, but the doctor wasn't stupid. "Help him."

Blinsky nodded emphatically, his face so sketched with ache that it was starting to hurt the muscles in his cheeks. "I will," he stammered, then: "What happened?"

Peter's eyes rolled away white for a second, then returned.  
"I'm sorry.." he mumbled before he lost focus again and then his head thumped back onto the floor and the light was no more.

++

**MALENA**

Clutching the knob between her toes, Malena opened the hot water tap of the bathtub.  
She almost pulled a muscle in her leg doing that. Totally worth it.  
Added points for not shifting her ass too far off the toilet seat.

She left her leg resting on the edge of the tub and listened to the rush of the water for a couple of seconds. Then she pulled her t-shirt off and tossed it across the bathroom on top of her jeans, socks and shoes.

She wasn't even sure whether she was going to have a bath. She just needed to hear the water.

It was the closest thing she had to the sound of granma's old tv set.  
One of those chunky boxes of dark grey plastic; she hadn't seen it since elementary school.  
Whenever granma had to be in the kitchen or talk to mom or play cards, she'd put Malena in front of that tv and ram a videotape into the VCR player.  
And it was always some old movie in which everyone dressed weird and used words she'd never heard of. And always the same guy wearing the hat with the horns.

Many years later, when VCR was long dead and Youtube was starting to get too popular, Malena would try to look up that movie, but she never found it.

Anyway, the movie would end and then the VCR player would switch off and then there was the dense hiss of static.  
Malena would watch the grey, black and white speckles until the movie was long forgotten.  
She'd sit there on the cork-dry carpet and stare at the hissing screen. She'd stare for a long time. Kinda made her dizzy.  
After a while, the speckles weren't just moving across the screen anymore. They'd be moving out of the screen, floating into the living room.  
And she'd keep staring.  
Into it. Through it.  
The speckles would come closer (yet somehow not appear bigger). They'd come so close that sometimes they'd be all she could see.  
Even when she'd shut her eyes.  
They'd still be there with her.  
Behind her eyelids.

Eventually, every time, granma would come and dig her hands into Malena's armpits and hoist her up and away from the tv, scowling that she was ruining her eyesight.  
No sign of protest from little five-year old her; mouth half open and eyes glossy.

It would take at least another minute before the swirl of dots really began to fade from her vision. Sometimes faster if her older sister was there to tell her that she looked like a retard.

Malena blinked.  
The bathtub was almost half full and the steam filling the room was making her drowsy.  
That was okay though. Things needed to be a little blurry if she wanted any chance of seeing her real self.

She looked down to where her thighs pressed together.  
Nothing yet.

Malena shut her eyes.  
She thought about granma. About the room with the tv. The patterns on the carpet. The smell of vinegar.

She opened her eyes.  
Nothing.

Malena stayed calm, took a deep breath of wet steam into her lungs and closed her eyes again.  
Alright, now she saw the tv. The movie was on.  
But she couldn't understand what she was seeing on the screen. There were shapes, but it was like her brain had gone dumb. Whenever she thought she could identify something, the meaning would melt away.  
She tried, but it was starting to hurt to look at the tv, so she opened her eyes again.

Her breath stopped.

For a moment, she thought she was still looking at one of the shapes on granma's tv.  
But those were definitely her legs, neatly pressed together, except that now there were small, black horns growing out of them, pushing through the white of her skin.

Her eyes glossy and her mouth half open, Malena tentatively touched a fingertip to one of their neat, sharp tips.

She whispered the only two words that made sense.  
"Fuck wow."

++

**GODFREY TOWER**

"Move away please, sir."  
On paper, it could have sounded like a polite request. Rory Manafort was the lead security officer of Godfrey Tower and though his hands appeared to hang idly by his sides, his stiff, thick fingers looked like they had never bent during his life.

Rory was tall too. He got that from his mother. Everything else he got from his father, who had drowned her in the kitchen sink when Rory was five.

It was because of Manafort's sheer physical presence that Blinsky automatically took a step away from the two bodies on the floor.  
But as soon as he had done so, he caught a glimpse of himself inside his head and he didn't like what he was seeing. He froze, took a deep breath and turned to face Manafort.  
"I need these two," he spoke softly without blinking. "These two, I need them down in laboratory 5." God, he was acutely aware of the towering difference between himself and the security officer, but he just had to swallow that down. _Don't think about yourself._ _Just do it. Do_ _the job._

Manafort's brow - which appeared to consist of three heavily stacked layers, and served as his secondary method of communication - was unmoved.  
"This is a security matter, sir. Please move to the back of the premises," he droned.

Something made Blinsky look down.  
A narrow trail of blood was creeping out from under the body of Roman Godfrey and was approaching his shoes.  
Instinct told Blinsky to take another step back, but he knew that would look like he was intimidated by Manafort, so he fought the urge to move. He thought statue thoughts.  
To make matters worse, his nose itched like crazy.  
"I won't. I can't. This is a medical emergency," insisted Blinsky, pointing at the two bodies for effect. "If they're taken anywhere but my laboratory, these kids could die. They'll die."

Manafort's brow remained unaffected.  
"Intruders are under my jurisdiction. Please step aside."  
Before he had finished talking, the little, grey-stubbled doctor had briskly stepped up to him.  
"Look... man," hissed Blinsky, "this is The Godfrey Institute. Fucked up things like this happen here. This is a place where fucked up things happen. This is where people like Jonathan Pryce, Roman Godfrey and Galina Zhelezhnova-Burdukovskaya do their fucked up work and pay your fucked up salary."  
He hesitated, wondering if he should inch a little closer to Rory Manafort's massive face like they did in the movies. But he felt that was too silly, so he stayed where he was.  
"My name is Doctor Klaus Blinsky," he finished, "Look me up. I'm one of them."

Manafort still didn't give a twitch, but after a few seconds, he let out a strange, deep chuckling sound, which devolved into a puzzled grunt.  
Then he turned and started walking. The rest of the security staff shuffled and dispersed soon after, the sound of their boots notably muted.

Blinsky felt such a rush that he almost skipped on his feet as he turned around and walked back over to the bodies of Roman and Peter.  
His euphoria quickly evaporated when he remembered that most of the people doing the medical footwork at Godfrey Tower had been dismissed.  
"Somebody..!" he called out awkwardly, "Somebody get me a gurney!"

++

**JERI**

Jeri had been standing in the living room for half an hour now. She didn't want to sit down, didn't want to go upstairs to her room, she just wanted to be prepared and on her feet, in case something..

Something what?

In her head, she was still playing the sound of that twig snapping. Kinda like something had stepped on it. An animal, like a fox or a raccoon? A little bigger maybe. How much does a fox weigh anyway..?

"Fuck," she muttered.  
Mom and dad wouldn't be home till 7.

Jeri had been messaging Malena and Ariel, but neither of them replied. In fact, the messages still showed as unread.  
No way was she going to message her parents.

Angry and exasperated, she tapped Boyd's name on her phone.

++

**GODFREY TOWER, LABORATORY S5**

Peter didn't remember waking up. He just found himself sitting in a chair or something, wondering why everything was so heavy.  
Every thought hurt. Every fired neuron was like a knife slicing through tender, grey brain meat.

So when Peter tried to think where the fuck this place was, he immediately cramped up and hissed through his gritted teeth, while his hands flew to his skull, desperately pressing the two halves together.

He stayed holding his head like that until the crushing migraine ebbed away, although he knew it would be ready to flare back with any next wrong move he'd make.  
So Peter moved slow.

The lights on the ceiling were way too bright, that was one sure thing.  
He quickly put up a hand as a shield over his brow. Alright, that was a little more tolerable. At least now he could begin to look around.

First he looked down to see that he was sat in a wheelchair and there was a drip in his arm.  
His limp fingers ran over the tube inserted in his arm.  
Whatever.

Next, he squinted at the room in front of him. There was a hospital bed.  
Before he could squint hard enough to see that there was somebody lying in it, the thought of Roman leapt at him and his hands began a frantic, still feeble search for the controls of his chair.  
When he couldn't find any, he gripped the armrests and tried to push himself up.

Out of apparently nowhere, a concerned figure in a labcoat rushed up to him, hands raised in alarm.  
"Oh God, I didn't know you were awake. Have you.. How long have you?" the grey-stubbled man blurted. "I'm Doctor Blinsky. Don't get up yet, even if you feel that you can. You're hooked up to this thing for a reason."

Peter's brain was processing the doctor's words a syllable at a time, like a toothless old man trying to work through a meal.  
When his head started to hurt again, he gave up and just moaned: "Roman."

The doctor stood in front of him, hands still stuck out in a gesture to calm down, stay down.  
Peter's body was utterly inclined to agree, but he had to know who the fuck was in that bed and it had better only be Roman.

"He's in an artificial coma," Blinsky said. "And he's on bypass."

Peter tried to open his eyes more, fighting the light.  
Blinsky saw. "Sorry.." he said and quickly moved to the wall and turned a dial until the lights were sufficiently dimmed. "Better?"

Peter drew in a breath and carefully tried to look again.  
"Yes," he whispered. Then, hoarsely: "You're talking about Roman? Is that..?"

Blinsky nodded and gestured towards the bed.  
"Yes, this is him. You couldn't have brought him here a minute later."

Feeling the disorientation wear off, Peter tried to piece together his own most recent recollections. The woods. The Tower.  
His eyes sought focus on the bed and his hands started batting at the wheels of his chair again. "How.. How do I..?"

Blinsky raised his hands again. "Uh, it's best if --"  
But Peter yanked the drip out of his arm and brusquely pushed himself to his feet.  
His legs felt so long. He had got used to wolf legs.

It was only three steps to the bed, but he collapsed on the third and fell hard on his knees, hands clutching the side of the bedframe.  
With a groan, Peter hoisted himself back up until he could look at the figure lying there.

Roman's face had always been pale. Now he was blue.  
And he was naked, except for a surgical towel draped over his loins.

His chest was smooth, almost wax-like.  
Except for the trail of large staples that ran along the underside of his sternum.

Peter gasped for air, trying to get the words out.  
"Will he be back? Will he be alright?"  
He didn't take his eyes off the body.

Only when he didn't get an answer from Blinsky did he turn his head to the doctor.  
Peter raised a questioning hand, trembling with effort and dizziness. "Is he..?"

"Erm," Blinsky began. A delicate frown was on his forehead.  
"He's gonna be alright..!" Peter blurted.

"He's stable," said Blinsky, "But his heart is too damaged to repair itself. This machine is pumping a special blood mixture through his veins, customized for his upir needs."

Peter looked again.  
Roman's lips were purple. He looked drowned. It was the most terrifying thing Peter had seen.  
He felt like a dumptruck of ice had just been unloaded into his stomach.  
"Can you fix it? Can you fix him?" he grunted, reaching out with his fingers until they were an inch from Roman's cheek.  
They hovered there for seconds until he drew his hand away.

"He needs a new heart," the doctor said slowly. "An upir heart, I suppose."  
Peter took a breath that he didn't even realize how badly his lungs were needing.  
"Do you have one of those?" he asked, unable to keep hope out of his voice.  
"No," sighed the doctor.  
"Then I'll find one," Peter felt the steel return to his eyes. He turned and steadied himself, but his legs buckled again and he barely managed to stay upright.  
Blinsky quickly rolled the wheelchair close and took Peter's hand. "Perhaps. But first you've got to sit right here."  
The doctor's hand felt warm, gentle, though a little damp.  
"I'm fine. I'll just.. lean on this," drawled Peter, nodding at the bedframe.

A sigh.  
It came from the bed.  
Peter's eyes widened and he looked.  
Roman was looking back at him, although not by much. His eyes had opened the barest of slivers and there was only white underneath the lids.

"Roman? Roman. Oh Jesus shit," stammered Peter, as Doctor Blinsky joined him in peering down incredulously at the blue face that appeared to twitch, as if it were half dreaming.  
Those purple lips moved and Peter bowed his head down, waiting for another sigh, anything.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Roman's eyes opened halfway.  
"This doesn't usually happen," muttered the doctor, who quickly moved over to the bedside equipment and began to scan all the readings.

"Roman," said Peter again. His heart had begun thudding dangerously in his own chest. Something in his bones tried to shift, tried to push out. He hissed and squeezed his eyes shut, counting quietly - _eleven, twelve.. thirteen_ \- until it passed.

"Hi.." he heard Roman whisper.  
Peter opened his eyes.  
Roman's eyes were seeing him too now. Webs of thin, purple veins ran through the white of them.

"Hey," Peter whispered back, feeling a little faint.

Blinsky budded in from the other side of the bed: "Please.. please don't try to move."

Roman's voice was hoarse and barely audible. He couldn't even hear it himself.  
"Why.." he smirked weakly, trying to focus his eyes, but his pupils couldn't stay still.  
He was sure he was seeing Peter, but this was all very unreal-feeling. Like candy floss. Like the smell of butter and popcorn. Like the merry-go-round.  
It was all here, right in front of Roman. He was at the carnival, on the merry-go-round. The music. The night. His lungs filled and his heart rose. Ahead of him, a girl on her white horse. Crackling lightbulbs spun around in endless pursuit. Knuckles tight, Roman's foot pressed the gas pedal way down. But he never crossed the distance between him and the girl. Letha's sickle-sharp eyes looked back over her shoulder, laughing while her horse bent back to clench its bared teeth into her thigh.

In alarm, Roman's eyes opened wide, as did his mouth, but the warning he wanted to shout out never came.

He was looking at Peter's face above him, not that far away. Very close, in fact. _Shit, his hair._ Peter's hair was white.  
It didn't make him look old. Just different.

Roman felt the pillow under his head now. He was in a bed.  
And he realized that he was talking. Or rather, he was deliriously mumbling, sometimes whispering, "I'm sorry" over and over.  
He didn't know for how long he'd been saying the words, or for how long he'd have continued saying them. Probably till he was sure that he had spoken them out loud, that they weren't some echo trapped inside his own overcooked brain.

It didn't immediately occur to Roman that he could stop himself.  
But something in Peter's face - a quick blink of the eyes, a hint at a frown - told him that he'd been heard. So he reached out from the deep well of his mind and tentatively commanded himself to shut up.

It worked. Roman's tongue stilled itself. And, when it remained still after the next few seconds, Roman felt dizzy with relief.

Also, he generally felt dizzy.  
That was fucking frustrating, because he needed to talk to Peter. He had to tell him everything.

Roman felt his heart - or whatever it was he had - shrink with panic when Peter directed his eyes away from him, to the doctor on the other side of the bed.  
Till he got a grip on his vocabulary, eyes were all he had.

Peter was saying stuff to the doctor. Roman tried to listen, but his brain was too slow, too confused to link the words to their meaning.  
He lost himself for a moment in the idea that this would last forever, that nobody would understand him ever again. He would never be a part of anything or anyone else and he would spend his life a fucking tourist.

Then he heard Peter say his name, right in the middle of a string of nonsensical babble.  
Roman. That's who he was.  
Then a few more words - "awake" and "talk" - began to make their way through the fog and the next wave of relief soaked through Roman's consciousness.

Then Roman smelled latex gloves and medicine. He could feel his nose taking in their nano-particles.

He also felt his eyes now. They were bone-dry. He had never felt anything as incredibly dry before. Every little shift or twitch scraped painfully, like he was dragging them over sand.  
As if on cue, Blinsky's blue-gloved hand hovered over, holding a pipette, and a cool drop of liquid was deposed in each of Roman's aching eyes.  
He groaned with both pain and relief.

Through the blur, he could still see Peter.  
"Peter," Roman said; the first time he actually felt himself move his own jaws, tongue and throat to form syllables.  
It had been so long. He had been so desperate to talk, but now he was facing a mountain.  
He had so much to explain, to try and take back. Some things couldn't be taken back at all. But he had to say something.

"Pe--" he tried again, but his throat gave out and cut his friend's name off in a series of guttural coughs.

"Shh.." Peter shushed him with a non-commital, gentle authority that Roman only knew from mothers other than his own.  
Then Roman felt Peter's fingers carefully slip themselves between the back of his head and the pillow, and propped up his head just a little while bringing a plastic cup to his lips.  
Roman's eyes briefly shifted up at Peter's, then down at the cup. He couldn't see what was in it.  
"It's water," said Peter softly, just a notch above a whisper. He looked tense. Not unfriendly, but there was not much of the laid-back hammock boy there either.

Roman's parched lips parted and he drank it all.  
Peter's hand raised the back of his head to help him swallow. Roman almost spat the water out right away, but managed not to.

As his head was raised, he caught a glimpse of his own body and there were tubes going into his chest and there definitely was blood pumping through those tubes.  
Before he could have a better look, Peter was already slowly laying his head back on the pillow.  
But the glimpse of himself, all tubed and wired up, was enough.

Roman realized he felt sick. There was a weird taste in his mouth and whatever was running through his veins felt a little too cold.  
He felt like some creepy mannequin that was being experimented on.  
If they'd yank away the surgical cloth from his loins, there'd be nothing between his legs. Or maybe something worse than nothing.

He managed to half-blink, and it didn't hurt anymore. The fluid that Blinsky had dropped in his eyes had begun to trail away past his temples. The marvels of the medical underworld. They were now doing his crying for him.

"Peter?" Roman managed at last. Saying the name felt like a cattleprod to his balls.

Peter's face was a bit more level with his own now. He was sitting, one hand clutching the metal of the bedframe.  
Roman's breath stopped for a second when he saw that Peter was sitting in a wheelchair.  
"Fuck. What..? Oh no," he croaked, his eyes widening.  
Peter looked confused for a second before realizing what the hell Roman was looking at and then he quickly and firmly put his hand on Roman's chest, well above the stapled area.  
"I'm okay.. I'm alright. This is.. I'm just beat-up is all," Peter assured with his voice still raspy from everything.

Roman glared back and forth between Peter's eyes and Peter's wheelchair for a long moment. Then he relaxed a little.  
"Shit.." he muttered, then, almost inaudibly: "Sorry."  
Peter shrugged. "Should see the other guy."  
Roman didn't dare smile, didn't dare not smile either. "That wasn't me," he said, his eyes shifting.  
"I know," said Peter, "Don't try to get up. Doc said you'd feel like shit. And you look like you believe him."

Roman didn't protest. He felt like a punching bag after nine rounds.  
But for a moment, that feeling disappeared when Peter reached out and carefully grabbed his upper arm. Peter's fingers were warm in every way that Roman needed.  
"You'll feel better," said Peter, "But you gotta take it easy. Doc gave us five minutes and then he's gonna put you under. So if you wanna talk, I'm here."  
He sounded awkward, trembly, eager.

"Yeah," muttered Roman. With aching difficulty, he tried to bring his hand to his own chest, but bending his elbow proved to be a sisyphean effort already. When he managed to bend it just enough, his fingertips brushed over the hard, sterile plastic that covered his sternum.  
"Oh. You got me good," he croaked.

Peter drew in a sharp breath and winced.  
"That was the vargulf," he said hushedly, some gypsy superstition that it would wake up again on the mention of its name.

It certainly made Roman want to curl up into a coma again.  
_The vargulf. Who let that thing out of its cage to begin with?_  
From the back of his memory, a mocking chorus answered with the snap and crack of Destiny's neck.

"I didn't wanna do it," Roman spilled out. It sounded evasive, useless and incriminating to himself the moment it left his lips.

Silence.  
He didn't dare look into Peter's eyes now, but he heard him breathe a single, long breath out of his nostrils.  
Roman felt the hand on his arm trying not to tense.

"I know," said Peter hesitantly, "I know you didn't."

Roman felt his throat close in on itself.  
"I was always the fucking animal, wasn't I?" he haltingly said, "Not you. You're the only real thing out here."

Peter squeezed Roman's shoulder and let go. He couldn't hear those words now. They made him feel betrayed or something. It was too weird.  
"Stop talking like that," he muttered.  
He ran a hand awkwardly through his white locks until he was suddenly totally aware he was doing it out of nerves, so he dropped it, leaving his hair half messed up. If Roman had been looking at him then, Peter wouldn't have been able to keep his eyes straight.

"Well, I fucked us over real sweet.." croaked Roman, "I'm such.. a piece of shit. You don't even know."

"Shut up," Peter droned, "I know you. You're not like that. You don't do shit like that."

Roman frowned into himself. He felt empty. Like shock, but worse. Like it was going to stay this way.  
"Well, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing," he blurted, "You know that, right? I don't have a fucking clue. I don't know why the fuck I'm here."  
He coughed again and it earned him a raw ache from one of the tubes that pierced between his ribs.

When the sharp pain passed enough for him to stop squinting, Peter was looking him in the eye again.  
"We'll figure it out," Peter force-mumbled.

Roman's brow furrowed and a dull panic crept up in his ribcage.  
"Lynda?" Roman whispered in a rush, feeling he didn't deserve to even think of her name.

"She's fine," said Peter, taking another deep sigh of a breath, "But you gotta stop wrecking your head, man. Breathe slow."

Roman's lips parted, but didn't know what sound to make.  
_Breathe._ Easy to forget how if you don't pay attention to it.

"I'm all messed up.. I dunno if I'm dead anymore. What the fuck.." he muttered through terse lips, "What's the fucking difference anymore? You killed me, right? Fuck it. I don't give a shit. If you wanna do it again, then.. f-feel.." The coldest chill he'd ever felt made him stop talking.

Peter felt it too and he pushed his hand onto Roman's chest, not sure if his palm could even give any warmth.  
"You fucking tard, I don't wanna kill you. Where the fuck would I go? You think I can just.. walk away..?" He wrinkled his nose in despair, disgust. "I don't wanna go anywhere. I.."

The whole room, everything, Roman, the cold, all of it crushed him.  
Scared, he looked at his own hand on Roman's lukewarm skin.

And Roman looked at him through bruised eyelids. Peter's hand there made him forget about all the plastic stuck to him.

"Say it.." Roman managed, his lips heavy with numbness.

That brightened Peter's eyes and blew away the fog.

"When I was out there, in the woods.. I felt, like, free, I guess."  
Peter cast his eyes down, worried his top lip with his teeth.  
"Didn't have anyone on my back, you know. No mom, uncles, cousins.. no fucking teachers. That was kinda good in a fucked up kinda way, I guess."  
Peter shook his head, frowned. That was all true, but this was starting to creepily feel like somebody else's memories. He sniffed, ignored it, kept talking.  
"When you're the vargulf, you get this tunnel vision. Everything's a mess, so nothing's complicated. You got a beginning and an end and that's it. That's all there is."

Peter had gradually been lifting his hand off Roman's chest. Only a brush of his fingertips now lingered. He caught himself staring at a nipple, hard and pink, but also purple. He swallowed, shrugged, forgot what he was saying.

Roman coughed deep down in his throat. "Sorry," he rasped, which somehow got Peter back on track of his thoughts.

"When I saw you.. again.. alive.. all that turned to shit. Didn't mean dick. It was like... I don't know. Everything just started meaning something again. Roman."

It jolted Roman to hear Peter say his name. His eyes still felt like battery acid, but his chest was empty and it confused the hell out of him.

"I was so fucking relieved," said Peter.

A trace of a smile glinted in Peter's eyes. One could've blinked and missed it, but Roman never did.

"Why..?" Roman whispered, trying to picture it all, connecting the dots.

Peter coughed out a chuckle, which he promptly hid behind his knuckles as he leaned back in the wheelchair.  
"Dude. I don't know. Because it was like I'd gone and dreamt it all. Fuck... this is weird. Everything's weird."

For lack of heart, something lurched in Roman's gut, and he stiffly gazed around the room, looking for some answer that wasn't there.  
"So... what? Are you okay? What are we?" he stammered, at a total loss. "What are we now?"

Peter slumped in his wheelchair.  
"I don't know yet."  
He limply threw his hands up from the armrests.  
"I just don't want to be alone."

++

**JERI**

Her heart and her lungs fought inside her chest.

Jeri had made the run, all the way to Boyd's house, a block and a half away.  
She was panting and something hot and sticky was lodged deep in her throat. But she'd made it. Right to the front door. Her soles burned to the point that they were going to burst in her shoes.  
Panting, she looked up. The sky was orange going on pink.

Back in her bedroom, Jeri had messaged Boyd twice on every app she knew, but got no reply on any of them. So, after she'd carefully scrutinized her parents' backyard left and right, she had burst out the door and started running.

And here she was. But she wasn't inside yet. Now she had to stumble through the alley that led to the back entrance of Boyd's place. Smelled of cat piss and beer.

There was nobody in their backyard, which was a mess of overgrown grass, shreds of cardboard and junk.  
She almost tripped over her feet trying to get her hand on the door handle. To her orgasmic relief, the handle gave way and the door opened.

Quickly, she closed it behind her and locked it shut in every way possible.  
Then she turned to face the kitchen, which always smelled a little like ripe, spoiled fruit. It was dark. Jeri hadn't been here in almost a year. She looked at the formica table, where she and Ariel had sat, bored, comparing their toes.

Now, with the outside casting its shadows all over it, the table just looked weird.

Jeri's heart gradually adjusted from being-chased pounding to not-wanting-to-get-caught thumping.  
She stalked halfway through the kitchen, then stopped. She listened to the house for people sounds.  
There weren't any.

She probably ought to call out. But Jeri really didn't want to end up talking to Boyd's parents. _But_ she didn't want to be caught ambling in the dark like some stalker creep.  
Her nerves tied into knots.

She was just getting ready to vocally announce herself when there was a thick creaking sound coming from the ceiling and a chill crept up her back.

There was someone upstairs.  
Jeri waited, listened for more creaking, hoping it was someone casually pacing down the corridor. Maybe Boyd. Or his mom or his dad.  
But she didn't hear any more creaks.

Jeri swallowed. Now she definitely didn't want to call out.  
To make matters worse, some invisible piece of fluff had settled under her nose and even after she clawed it away, the urge to sneeze was unbearable.

She ignored the urge, because there was another creak, followed by a muffled hollow thud.  
Jeri's curiosity began to tug the rope away from her fear.  
The sound had come from the same place. Upstairs, to the right.  
Boyd's room.

That was good. Nothing creepy ever happened in Boyd's room.

Jeri stalked into the corridor and stood looking up at the staircase. In her mind, like a ghost, Boyd's face showed up at the top, pale and looming eerily down at her, like in old Dracula movies.

She sniffed, mostly to get rid of the sneeze, but also as a subtle announcement of her presence. _Ready or not,_ _I'm coming up_ _._

She put her foot on the first step and then her phone buzzed horribly in her pocket, loud and urgent like a swarm of hornets.  
Mortified, Jeri wrestled it out of the tightness of her jean shorts and managed to cut it off halfway through the second buzz. It had been Ariel.

Jeri looked up the staircase open-mouthed, her face in anticipatory apology mode. There was no way they hadn't heard it, whoever was up there.

But nobody showed.  
In fact, there was the creaking sound again. Definitely coming from Boyd's room.

Jeri took a breath, shut off her brain and began to take the staircase.  
She kept going until she was almost at the top and she could see Boyd's door, a strip of light peeking out underneath.

Again, she considered just calling out a tentative hello, but that never ended well in movies.

Jeri took the last two steps and now she heard something new.  
It was very muffled, but it sounded maybe like somebody clapping really softly, like the dullest sarcastic applause ever.  
No, actually it reminded her of when she was little and went to the butcher shop and she'd spent far too long watching the butcher's son thumping at a huge, red, juddering slab of cow meat with a meat tenderizer.  
The boy had stopped his merciless battering for a second and looked at her and she'd looked away just a little too late.

The door to Boyd's room wasn't totally closed.  
Jeri's stomach lurched and it almost took control of her legs, almost made her tip-toe back down the stairs, out the front door, back into the dusk of Hemlock Grove.

Instead, there was another creak and she stupidly took a startled half-step back and bumped the back of her shoe against the wooden post of the staircase.  
_Fuck._ She froze and rolled her eyes at herself.  
Now there was seriously no way that whoever was in there didn't know that she was here.

The eyes of the butcher's son looked back at her.

And Jeri couldn't help it; she made a silent scowl and bullied herself forward, grasped the door handle tight, like the butcher boy's white-knuckled hand.

And she pushed.

Boyd's room was pretty big. That kinda made up for the low, slanting ceiling.  
There were posters, scattered things.  
And there, facing out the window, was Boyd, naked and pale, resting his elbows on the window sill, while some other kid was behind him, one hand clutching Boyd's shoulder, the other his hip, fucking him. He was fucking Boyd.

They both had their backs turned to Jeri, who stood there, surprised by her own serenity.  
Was she waiting for the spirit of some pornstar to possess her, boldly catwalk up to them, tap the boys on the shoulder and tell them mommy's home?

She had the presence of mind to notice that the boy fucking Boyd had earphones plugged in, the thin white cables dangling over Boyd's back.  
And Boyd's head stuck out the window, so he probably hadn't heard her stumbling around either.

There was a weird quiet to their fucking, except for an occasional series of muffled claps when the other boy picked up the pace and angled his cock in some way that made Boyd stand on his tiptoes, making the floorboards creak.

Jeri saw that the soles of his feet were patched dirty brown.

"Shit," she heard him mutter and her calf muscles tensed in panic.  
But Boyd just hung his head in a grunted sigh and bumped his forehead against the window's outer ledge. He didn't notice or care and kept on letting the boy fuck him.

Still, it was close enough to a warning. Jeri took a very slow step back. She'd already fucked up walking backwards a minute ago, but there was no way she was gonna take her eyes off this.

She already knew Boyd had a nice ass. But now it was being obscured by one that was just a little more.. worked out?  
Some gym buddy? No way. Boyd wasn't exactly a gym rat.  
Then again, Boyd apparently knew how to keep a secret.

Very curtly, Jeri glanced back over her shoulder to make sure she wasn't walking into the door or anything.  
When she looked in front of her again, she saw Boyd's eyes in the glass of the open window, reflected straight at her and her breath caught in her throat.

Boyd's whole body tensed in alarm, but the other boy tightened his grip on Boyd's frame and started pumping his cock in faster, tersely grunting "Fuck yeah.."

With a wavering yell, Boyd flung his arm up. "No..! Wait! Stop, you idiot!"

Jeri wasn't sure if he meant her or his suitor, but she stiffly took another step back, suddenly scared.  
But it was also ridiculous, so she laughed. Just for a few seconds. It sounded like her mom's laugh; way heartier than Jeri had ever let herself. Till now.  
She tried to back out of the room, but her butt bumped into the dresser.

Confused, the other boy yanked his earphones out as Boyd half-turned and punched him in the chest, finally forcing him to disengage.  
"What the fuck..?"

Jeri saw the other boy's cock, hard and tanned and shiny. And as he turned to her, it veered along and pointed right at her, antenna-like.  
But now she was looking at his eyes; so dark that she couldn't tell the colour. Made him look a little older than he probably was. And he was gypsy, 100%.  
"Oh hey," he said.

Behind him, Boyd was swearing and lunging for a shirt on the ground, anything to cover himself.  
A small mercy to his shame, his cock had wilted in record time.

The gypsy boy, still panting, threw a disparaging hand at him. "Chill out, man. You're freaking me out," he said with the tranquilest, least freaked out voice Jeri had heard ever.

She tried not to look at his cock, but she was still seeing it.  
"I'm Jeri. Sorry. I thought there wasn't anybody home," she said.

Gypsy boy scoffed. "Yeah, that's what he told me."  
Boyd had sat down on his bed with a comicbook opened at the centerfold, the pages facing down on his lap. Tears glistened in his eyes. "You asshole," he wheezed, "I didn't know this bitch was gonna break into my fucking house."

"Well, I didn't know you were a bitch," Jeri bit at him.  
Lips tightened with rage, Boyd threatened to stand up, but he realized he had to fart, so he stayed on the bed with Wolverine looking up at him from his groin.

"Not always," the gypsy chuckled and Boyd glared at him with incredulity.

Jeri's chest tingled with adrenaline, but it was now aimed at making something out of this conversation instead of escaping it.  
"If it helps, I'm not telling," she said, zipping her lips up with her fingers.

"Bullshit," Boyd grunted balefully.

"I saw a wolf," Jeri said, instantly blanketing the room with silence.

The gypsy had just started pulling up his pants and was adjusting his cock when he hesitantly froze.  
"A wolf," he echoed and he looked at her with something that could as easily have been blankness as it could have been profound understanding.  
Then he looked at Boyd.  
"She saw a wolf, man."

Boyd stared at him. Pale. Defeated.  
"Bullshit," he repeated.

++

**GODFREY TOWER, LABORATORY S5**

Roman was phasing in and out of sleep.  
From his wheelchair, just a stretch of a hand away, Peter watched him.  
There was almost no breathing (maybe Roman didn't need to anymore). But his ribs were moving, really slowly up and down, almost invisibly.

Peter looked at the apparatus embedded in Roman's chest. Ugly fucking thing. A parasite. Plastic carapace and twitching tubes, slurping and pushing.  
But it was what it was, and for now it was keeping Roman's blood circuit closed.

Peter's eyes stung and his head weighed him down. But he couldn't sleep. He had to fix this.  
He leaned his elbows on the bed's metal sidebar and ran his hands up over his face. The stubble on his chin and cheeks scratched his palms. When his hands reached his eyes, he held them there and thought about Shelley, and about Nadia.

Without much warning, Roman woke up with a gasp and a start and he tried to sit up.  
"Hey.. hey man, it's me," Peter shushed, quickly laying his hand on his chest to keep him from fully rearing up. "It's alright."

Roman looked at him. Or maybe he was looking at the wall behind him. It was hard to tell. The whites of his eyes were almost purple.  
"Peter?" he rasped, "I'm not dead. I'm not dead." His long-fingered hand hooked into the crook of Peter's elbow and clung there with desperate, iron-cast strength.

Peter leaned over the bed and locked eyes with him. "Roman. You're alive. And you're safe. Kinda. But you gotta lie down, man."

Roman frowned, but slowly relaxed and lay himself back down on the pillow. "Wanna go home," he mumbled, eyes rolling with delirium.

"I know," whispered Peter. He badly wanted to add some comforting, meaningless promise. _You will._ _Soon._  
Instead, he bowed down and kissed Roman on the head. And when his lips broke their seal and pulled away, an icepick surge of determination ran through Peter's heart and stayed there.

Peter had always thought home was anywhere, wherever he'd stop and take his shoes off, stick his feet in the stream.  
But the world had shrunk to the size of a pinprick. There was nowhere else he'd go now.

Roman was looking up at him, questioningly with eyes half-open. Then he blinked quickly a few times, as some memory flashed by, and his face crumpled with sadness.  
"What did we do?" he croaked. Right away, his eyes glazed and went shut.

"Fucked up shit," whispered Peter, pretty sure that Roman no longer heard him. He watched him for another minute and then looked up at Blinsky, who was sat hunched at one of the screens, steaming with concentration.

"He's not getting better," Peter called out over Roman's body.  
Blinsky clicked his mouse a few times, stared at the screen.

Peter sat up in the wheelchair, straightened his back. "What are you doing? What are you doing right now?"  
More mouse clicks. "I.. uh.." droned Blinsky.  
"Are we doing anything?" Peter raised his voice, "What the fuck is happening?"  
Blinsky finally snapped away from the monitor and looked over at him, frustration brimming in his eyes.

\- "It's not good. We don't have a lot of time, I'm afraid."  
\- "What do you mean? Why?" Peter clutched his armrests.  
\- "His body isn't processing the blood like it should. It's a.. an upir thing, Peter. The pump doesn't do.. all the things an upir heart does. With every cycle, he's getting weaker."  
\- "Then what?"

Blinsky paused.  
"Coma."

With a wild stagger, Peter jerked out of his wheelchair. "Then what do we _do_? Tell me what the fuck to do, I'll do it!"

Blinsky wasn't looking at him anymore. Peter felt a chill and turned his head to look at the security screen on the wall.

He watched and he saw.  
"Oh my god.." he heard Blinsky mumble in flat disbelief.

++

**GODFREY TOWER**

Most of Godfrey Industries' employees had gone home. The ones with any economic savvy remained, incarcerated in the board room, sweating and smoking.

In the foyer, a stone-faced cleaner was mopping up the dirt and blood off the floor.  
He was thinking about retirement. Although he was 64, he'd always looked pretty young for his age. Might move to some nice, inexpensive place, start a ranch, watch the squirrels. Maybe even get a wife again.

He looked up.

With a soft bump, the monolithic entrance doors opened, and two giants stepped in. No shit, they must have been 6 foot 9, each of them. So huge that it looked like they moved in slow motion.  
How did they even find suits for these guys? Matter of fact, the buttons of their black XXL jackets strained and tore, exposing glimpses of white shirt underneath.

Still slightly bowed over his mop, the cleaner squinted.  
Their faces. It took him a while to realize what he was looking at.  
The bones of their faces grotesquely protruded, everywhere. Their noses were stumps in a landscape of bulging skin, tautly stretched and pink.

So far, all that could be chalked up to some unfortunate deformity, something you wouldn't wish on any poor bastard. So the cleaner tried to snap out of his staring, but then he saw the rest.

Their eyes were gone.  
Either they had been swallowed by the twisted-double fold that was their forehead, or they had never been there in the first place.

The cleaner's heart skipped and his knuckles went cold.

He worked at Godfrey. He'd seen a thing or two.  
But here were two giants with no eyes. And they were walking into the foyer.  
Their massive shoes should have clacked on the floor, but the sheer weight pushing down on them muffled each step.

If only so he didn't have to look at their eyeless faces, the cleaner kept staring at those shoes. He heard the leather squeak in agony.

What happened next was what solidified his retiring plans.  
This was sort of how it went. The security guard, where'd he come from? The fool had ordered them to stop or something. Identify themselves.  
Who asks a pink monster in a suit with no eyes to identify themselves?

Before the idiot could even unholster his gun, the closest of the two giants thundered across the foyer and grabbed his face. And tore it off.

Everything in the cleaner's mind went sort of white then. There was no sound. How could there be?  
Something that had been a guy's jaw was held in the bunched up fist of this heavily breathing ape, along with a nose and a whole lot of bright red meat.

The guard stood there, dumbfounded at the loss of his face, unable to comprehend. One of his eyes was still there, white with panic and rolling wildly in its socket.  
His free arm, the one that hadn't been reaching for his gun, was stretched outward in a defensive gesture and shaking like he was having a seizure.  
Then the arm stopped shaking and the guard's body calmly folded into a pile on the floor, like an abandoned marionette.

The cleaner blankly leaned on his mop as the giants brushed past him, towards the elevators.  
And he absently wondered how the both of them were gonna fit in there.

The answer was: barely, but the two giants stooped slightly and managed to just about squeeze in.  
But the cleaner didn't see that. He never turned to look.  
Instead, he stayed there for a while.

After half an hour, he walked outside, clutching his mop in his numb hand, and he sat down on the stairs and that was that.

++

**GODFREY TOWER, LABORATORY S5**

"Oh my god," repeated Blinsky, his voice flat with horror.

Then Peter's fingers dug into his labcoated arm so viciously that he let out an unsteady yell of outrage and jerked towards the gypsy boy. Gritting his teeth, Blinsky suddenly felt the present, the here and now, flooding rapidly back into him.

Peter stood before him, all kinds of tense and with his shoulders trembling.  
"What?" Blinsky blurted, rubbing the sore spot on his arm.  
"We have to block the elevator," Peter hissed, himself quite wild-eyed.

Blinsky frowned, then nodded. _Of course these two giants were here for them._ _For Peter and for Roman._ _What else did anyone come here for anymore?_

"Right. I've got the keys," he said, but Peter had already marched off to the doors.  
"We gotta barricade them," Peter shouted back, hands shaking restlessly as he looked around for things to move.

Blinsky nodded vigorously, fished the keys out of his labcoat and stiffly strode towards the elevators.

When Peter hauled a large metal box out from a corner, a bunch of IV stands clattered loudly to the floor, and Roman drowsily lifted himself up on his elbows.  
"Where are you going..?" he muttered, too quietly for anyone to hear.

After Blinsky had locked the elevators, he wrestled the heavy box from Peter's hands. "Let me do this. You'll need your strength if those guys are getting in here."  
Peter was going to bullshit the doc and say he was fine, but he felt so sick he could barely speak and his legs and arms were already jell-o from the lifting he'd just done.

Pale and light-headed, he nodded and staggered off. When he saw Roman propped up on the bed, he staggered there a little quicker and almost collapsed when he got there, just about managing to hang onto the bedside.

"They're here," he almost puked as he dragged himself over to the wheelchair.  
Roman blinked his purple-shot eyes slowly. "Don't go," he slurred, almost incomprehensible without the vowels.

Peter's dirty white hair hung in front of his face. But he didn't need to see in order to find and take Roman's hand, cold on the bedsheets.  
"You think I dragged you here to die alone?" he grinned painfully.

Roman let out a sloppy hiss through his teeth, like a balloon drunkenly deflating. He slowly crooked his head to look at Peter. "We're gonna die?"

Peter dragged his hair back from his forehead. His eyes felt the way that Roman's looked. Everything hurt.  
"Depends," he sighed. He remembered Destiny's cards. They'd be predicting that he was going to die every time. She'd scoff and tell him it was because he'd be turning soon and the fates interpreted that as a death.

The elevator pinged.  
Blinsky froze just as he tossed a desk chair on the pile of medical equipment and furniture that he had stacked against the metal door. He bent to put his hands on his knees, panting, his hair a grey sweaty mess.

Peter had heard the ping too. He was still holding Roman's hand, as if time would stand still as long as he didn't let go.  
Then he took a breath, filled his lungs, let the oxygen carry through his veins to his brain, and he kept taking in more and more until his ribs and shoulders expanded and his skin cracked, ripped open.  
He was too tired to scream, so he just grunted a few times and let the pain have him.  
Pieces of him fell on the bedside and it was only when his feet burst that he let go of Roman's hand and tipped out of the wheelchair.

On the floor he writhed on, cracking and bending.  
From his tilted perspective, Peter saw Blinsky nervously holding a bone saw in one hand and something else in the other.

The elevator doors remained shut, but there was a rattling sound coming from inside.  
Then there was a hard, dull punching sound and the door slightly dented outward.  
Blinsky took a step back, terrified. But when he glanced sideways and saw what was happening to Peter, he almost forgot about everything.  
"Oy gevalt.." he mumbled.

The vargulf's teeth burst through what remained of Peter's face, white fur matted with blood and offal.  
It was enormous. It couldn't have fit in the slim gypsy's body.  
An absentminded tear ran down Blinsky's face. Even now, he was incredibly grateful when he was allowed to be witness to the impossible.

Pryce had shown him so much of that, after many years in the laborious everyday of conventional science.  
Before, Blinsky had come home from his job and he'd dream of poetry. But from then on, he would go to sleep dreaming of every next day in the lab, working with Pryce.

He had seen more than most other scientists would in their life, by far.  
Still it hurt that it had to end.

Another immense punch made the elevator doors rattle and bend out of shape.  
Through the expanding slit between them, Blinsky saw the giant. A sweating pink mass in a joke of a suit that was battering its inexorable way out.

 _Wait._  
_Not yet._

Metal squealed with the next punch, and the doors peeked open further. Enough for absurdly thick fingers to grip them and wrench with steady, brute force.

Blinsky thought of his wife, who hadn't seen him for days, and he tried to forgive himself for that.  
Then he thought of their daughters.  
_God, what a world I have left them. Forgive me, Ariel, Auden._  
He raised his hand, paused in order to get his aim right, then swung his shoulder and launched the bottle at the crack between the elevator doors.

There was a sound of glass shattering and a loud, sharp hiss. The sausage-like fingers slipped away from the crack and then there was something like a surprised grunt as stark white flames lashed out inside the elevator, making Blinsky take another step away.

The hissing swelled into a roar and the giants now both started punching at the doors frantically, letting out strange hoots.

Blinsky, open-mouthed, looked aside to Peter.  
The vargulf stood there, its head hung low, breathing with difficulty.  
Its yellow eyes stared at Blinsky and a low, ominous drone of a growl came from its deepest core.

"Peter.." he whispered.  
For a moment, he thought he was going to be wolf food before the giants would rip his face off. Either way, it was looking to be a closed casket for him.

Another huge smash and the sick squeal of metal. The doors, first one, then the other, were finally torn out of place, and the giants stumbled in. The barricade of boxes, chairs and things was simply barged out of the way. Blinsky started shaking.  
Their suits had been burned away and their skin was even pinker than before, still smoking and boiling from the white napalm.  
Thick, ropey veins ran across their bodies. Even down their absurdly fat, short cocks.

Blinsky's feet still backed away. He liked to think he wasn't a coward, but this was no fight for him. No fight for any human.  
His heart pounded deafeningly. The bone saw was going to be useless if his hand wouldn't stop shaking and his fingers feeling like they didn't belong to him.

The vargulf tried to steady itself, but couldn't quite stop its legs from swaying. No time. The first giant turned to face it.  
With a sound more like a whine than a snarl, the white wolf leapt at the thing.

The giants were big, but they were fast. This one lifted up a protective arm, which the vargulf's teeth tore into as soon as it crashed into the giant's body with such force that its footing wavered.

Blood.

The vargulf savaged the trunk-sized arm, through skin, through muscle, through more muscle.  
But then the giant's other arm punched the wolf in the stomach and it flew back, taking a chunk of flesh with it as it crashed and slid across the smooth white floor.

The wolf wheezed and whined with pain. Several of its ribs had broken. Too soon.  
It tried to get up, but every move felt like glass in its sides.

As the wolf scrambled and panted, one of the giant's enormous feet, with the smoking remains of a black shoe still attached to it, stomped on the wolf's hind leg, shattering it.  
The vargulf bayed and howled in agony. Its remaining hind leg pawed at the floor mindlessly, while it tried to drag itself away with the front pair.

But the giant was no longer interested. Its feet thudded right past the curling, crippled wolf, headed for Roman's bed.

The vargulf's yellow eyes followed it and something in its feral mind began to glow, and then to burn.  
There had been an annoying presence tempering its abandon. One that split the vargulf's self in two. Its life was no longer its own to throw away.  
It was now itself. And it was Roman Godfrey.

And if Roman died, it died too.

The monstrous burned-pink moloch was just steps away from the bed when an immense force yanked its right leg backwards and most of its calf muscle was ripped out from behind.  
With a loud hoot, the giant stumbled and almost dropped to its knee, but it managed to stay up, leaning its weight on the other leg.  
It staggered around its own axis just quick enough to swat away the crippled wolf before it could lunge again.

It was a swat, but to the vargulf, it was like being struck with a concrete wall.  
The wolf flew back against the wall, where it remained limp and dazed. Whatever teeth hadn't fallen out rattled loose in its jaw, which somehow was still in one piece.

_Roman._

The wolf craned its head to see that the giant was slowly hobbling over to the bed.  
With a desperate, dry wheeze, the vargulf's shoulders strained to drag its body back up, but it didn't even feel anything below them anymore.

This couldn't be the end. But it was.

On the bed, Roman's eyes had rolled back and his mouth lay gaping open.  
The giant loomed over him and unceremoniously raised its arm, ready to swing down and batter him into unrecognizable pulp.  
There was to be nothing left, so the hunter had instructed.

Roman's nose twitched.  
His eyes shut, then opened, looked straight at the giant.

The giant stopped. Listened to new instructions.

Behind it, the wolf still tried to rear up its broken body. It puffed and frothed at the mouth, helplessly glaring at the back of the giant standing over the bed.

And, on the other side of the lab, Blinsky had managed to keep away from the other giant by a simple strategy of ducking and running, occasionally tossing a bedpan at it. There was no way he could get a swipe in with the bone saw. The thing was just too quick for that, in spite of its lumbering appearance.

Blinsky was out of breath, close to a coughing fit. He couldn't go on, but he had to go on. He had to hope.

Slower with every dodge and run, he had to duck in order not to get his head swiped off his shoulders by a massive open hand.  
That was too much. His ankle twisted and he fell.

When he looked up, two enormous hands wrapped around the giant's face from behind and hooked their fingers into its mouth, its nose, anywhere it could find purchase, and grotesquely stretched it apart like a rubber mask until it tore into a lopsided mess.

Blinsky screamed.  
He almost forgot to roll away before the giant crashed loudly forward into a cabinet filled with surgical instruments, smearing the walls and floor with the remains of its face.

He looked up again just in time to see the second giant calmly putting its hands to the sides of its own head and slowly crushing its skull like a pumpkin in a press.  
Blinsky closed his eyes, horrified. But he still heard the sounds - even when he mimicked the dying monster by clasping his hands over his ears - so he screamed some more.

++

"In the death cell, a single note rings on and on and on"

\- R.S.

♫ _Sonic Youth - 100%_


	3. Episode 3: From The Wreck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you read this episode before October 24 of 2017, then you'll have probably bumped into a few stupid writing goofs that I hopefully have all tracked down and eradicated by now. Sorry, I was on lots of heroin, smack, opium and horse when I wrote this. <3

**MALENA**

Her sister knocked on the bathroom door again, harder than the last time. She didn't even say anything this time. Bitch.  
"Still bleeding," Malena droned, not even dignifying her with an eye roll.

Her back pressed against the bathtub, she sat in a sort of slouched position, naked, staring at her bellybutton.  
The tub's ceramic edge had started to bite into her back, but she ignored it, took its sting as another test.

Malena could hear her sister's exasperated sigh behind the door, followed by brisk footsteps marching off.  
And then it was just her and the silence once again.

She'd stared at her bellybutton long enough for it to start looking really weird.  
Perfectly smooth belly... then, bam, some pointless dimple going nowhere. She had something between an innie and an outie, she supposed. Weird little knot of flesh.  
Seventeen years ago, some nurse had thoughtlessly twisted that thing into the shape that Malena would be stuck with for all her life.  
Everything else was mom's or dad's, but this.. scar.. was a gift from a total stranger.

She wetted a finger with her saliva and stuck the tip into it to see if she could make herself feel anything there.  
She closed her eyes, pretended it was something else, someone else doing it.

The steam that floated through the bathroom had begun to evaporate. Soon, she would have to make a choice between staying in her semi-fetal position or going through the bother of pulling the plunger, waiting for the tepid water to drain and running another hot bath.

What steam there was left, she took deep into her nostrils, inhaling until the lightbulb of her brain started flickering just right, like a moth fluttering inside her skull.

Malena's feet slid slowly over the tiled floor until her legs were fully stretched out.  
She looked at her toes. Stubby little monkey fingers. The littlest one didn't look like much at all. Might as well have been put there by the nurse, as a joke. She wiggled it, to see if she could.

Her fingertip circled, meandered in her bellybutton, running over the soft little knot. She wondered if it could be unraveled at all. Would it hurt?  
Would she be left with a hole directly into her stomach?

She thought about granma's tv, the thick dark grey box. Anything could've been inside its dense casing.  
She could've stolen a screwdriver from granpa's toolbox and taken a look inside, but the truth is she really didn't want to.  
Malena would have hated the disappointment of finding nothing but wires and tiny switches welded onto crude plastic boards. The tv had power, and it shared that power with her. She did not want to take that away, just for the sake of an autopsy.

Something sharp pricked into her fingertip. With a soft gasp, she stopped her exploring. She didn't look, just held still and waited.  
Her lips parted in lazy expectation as she very gently pressed back.  
It was hard. And she knew it would be black and shiny, like carapace.

Still not looking, she ran her finger down the curved edge. It was growing, peeking out of her bellybutton, pointing up towards her.

A shiver ran down her body in the opposite direction.  
Where did it come from? What did she want from it?  
So many questions.

Malena sighed, brought her finger to her lips again.

++

**GODFREY TOWER, LABORATORY S5**

"Peter. Peter. Peter."

Blinsky staggered over towards the sound of the staccato voice that was calling the same name over and over.  
His face felt hot and sticky with giant gore. But his hands were smeared red too, so he couldn't wipe his face with them.

Stumbling over one of the IV stands lying on the floor, he stretched his arms out towards the bed.  
Roman sat bolt upright, eyes purple and rolled back, a river of blood spilled from his nose and down his chin.  
"Peter. Peter."

Movement on the floor made Blinsky take a wild, lurching swerve in the opposite direction. But then he saw it was the wolf, its white fur splattered and torn.  
It lay on its side, panting slowly, unsteadily. He could hear it.  
One yellow eye fixed on him, followed him.

Hesitantly, Blinsky stepped towards its shuddering body.  
He knelt.  
The eye looked back at him, judging, unblinking.

Slowly, Blinsky reached into his labcoat.  
He whispered to the wolf. "Are you sure?"

The yellow eye turned to the bed, to Roman.

Blinsky sighed, drew in a deep breath. He willed his hand to be steady.  
Out of his pocket, he drew a scalpel.

The wolf eye didn't look anymore. Its panting had slowed down to a near nothing.

Behind his back, Blinsky heard Roman's mantra, like a heartbeat, two syllables pushing on and on and on.

And he started moving his lips to it. First without sound. Then it became a whispering.  
By the time he knelt over the wolf's raised flank and aimed the scalpel downwards, he was saying the name, repeating it.

The silver tip pushed in.  
And by the time that Blinsky separated the ribs, he could hear it inside the warm chest cavity of the wolf. A pulse that called back, weak but persistent.

Peter. Peter. Peter.

His hands slipped in. Through thin latex fingers, he felt hot, wet organ weight press down, trying to keep him out.  
Blinsky breathed deep. He felt it. It throbbed back at him. The salt of his sweat stung the corners of his eyes as he carefully cut through the tethers.  
Blood pooled.  
The scalpel almost slipped.  
He paused, willed his knuckles to relax before he proceeded.

"God," Blinsky whispered, as concise a prayer as he could allow himself.  
It came loose. More blood, everywhere. His coat was a butcher's apron.  
There was a sound like the sea in his ears. That helped. He liked the sea. He and his brother, catching starfish in a plastic bucket.  
Blinsky smiled, just for a second. No time for memories.

One last tug, one last cut.  
He held it now. The heart of a vargulf, here, in his hands. Pryce would have been over the moon.  
And when Blinsky turned to place it in the cooler, he saw Roman had died.

++

**SHELLEY**

The storm was turning her headscarf into a wind vane, and Shelley Godfrey was this close to just ripping it off and stuffing it into her coat.

But she drew attention enough with her size. This was Providence, not Hemlock Grove. Here, she wouldn't just be a focal point of smalltown gossip, she wouldn't just be _that kid_ from school; here, people were afraid of her.

Aitor would be back soon with the jerrycan.  
She just couldn't stay in the truck anymore. It had been doing her back in.  
And Nadia was finally asleep, sprawled in the back seat. That made her happy. Made her feel like a good mom.

The sky was turning from grey to cold blue.  
She hadn't seen a car pass by for a while now and that was making her nervous.  
The wind peeled, bent the trees until they loomed over her and the truck. She bit her lip defiantly, not blinking.

They had gone from motel to motel, occasionally just parking under a bridge or in an alley and sleeping there.  
Aitor had become quieter, more repetitive in the things he said. Something worried at him. It was probably just the driving. The road could get lonely, even if Shelley read to him from the passenger's seat.

She turned away from the trees, just in time to see Nadia sit up, immense blue eyes staring at something far beyond where anyone could see, and then scream.

++

**GODFREY TOWER, LABORATORY S5**

Blinsky rubbed his eyes. He had fallen asleep in his desk chair again. He wasn't sure how long it had been, but when he tried to move, his joints groaned in protest.  
He smelled quite terrible, even though he'd long ditched his gory mess of a labcoat.

No time for petty vanity now. He lifted his behind off the chair for a moment, just to allow his muscles to find their natural alignments again. Then he sat back down and wheeled the chair over to the 3D sculptor.

It took a second before his eyes could focus properly on the hunk of muscle that was suspended inside a cube of frost-flowered glass. The mesh of molecule-thin metal wires was almost finished with its meticulous resculpting job.

A vargulf's heart was strong. Possibly strong enough for an upir.  
But the array of possible incompatibilities was beyond daunting. We were talking Doctor Moreau here. Fitting the head of a goose on the body of an alligator.

Blinsky had sworn to himself to keep his hopes down. That was a fairly simple thing to do, because this was a fool's errand. There was no way this would work.

That's what he had almost told Peter. But he had been unable to think of any better ideas, so he had merely shaken his head in disbelief and kept his mouth shut.

And then, yes, he had sighingly agreed.  
If Peter would turn again, Blinsky would put down the wolf (somehow) and excise its heart.

Blinsky had quietly assumed that he would be able to think of a less harebrained scheme before this insane eventuality would come to pass.  
When the two giants broke into the lab and it did come to pass, he wasn't even surprised.  
These eventualities had a way of finding their labyrinthian way to him.

Sometimes he really felt that he himself was too dull for this life.  
He once, half-seriously, wondered if it wouldn't be easier to just grow out that greying hair of his, abandon wife, daughter, friends and hygiene, and adopt a suitable maniacal laughter to accompany him into the darkness.

A look in the eyes of Johann Pryce was enough to dispel such fantasies. No real happiness lay there.  
Blinsky had always shied away from excessive laughter anyway. The smile on the faces of others had been enough for him. Their joy was his.

Abandoning his family was an even more ridiculous concept to him.  
Even now, when everything hurt so much he could barely talk, he was itching to phone his wife and daughter.  
But he'd let his phone battery expire two days ago. He knew that unseen forces were watching.  
The last thing he told them was to stay close to home and not worry about him. He'd catch up.

He wondered if he would.

The sculptor let out a long beep, followed by a sound effect on the computer.  
Blinsky bolted painfully upright in his chair and then wheeled back to the screen, his eyes rushing over the resulting data.

Little of it made common medical sense. There was no way this reformatted heart would beat again.

Blinsky ignored everything. He emphatically tapped a few keys, hard enough to resound around the lab, and wheeled over to the glass cube, which hissed and slowly began to lift.

While donning the thick gloves, he tried to peer through the mist that was spilling out.  
The vargulf heart had simply been too large to fit in a humanoid chest. Now, with the outer layers of muscle partially sliced away, size was no longer an issue.  
And Blinsky estimated that it should still be sufficiently powerful to serve Roman's uniquely aggressive biology.

Of course, Roman had been dead for a day now.

As Blinsky gently lifted the heart in his hands, careful as if it were a newborn, he murmured "And now for my next trick... Let's take you home, Peter."

++

**ROMAN**

Nobody remembers what it's like to be born. Nobody I know anyway.

It's kinda like fucking in reverse.  
No, _not_ because it's you coming out of a pussy, you fucking cro-mag.

Fucking is more than sticking your dick in one anyway. If you do it right.  
There's this whole.. I dunno..

Anyway, I remember the second time I was born.  
Actually, that was... actually a lot more like straight-up getting fucked. So forget what I just said.

Thing is, time gets weird just before it happens. You kinda feel it coming.  
Everything squeezes really fucking tight around you, like it's trying to choke you. So maybe it's really like getting hate-fucked by some bitch who has both her hands on your throat, red-polished thumbnails on your windpipe and all.

Fuck, I miss smoking.

Whoever is zapping my chest right now, I hope you have a pack somewhere.  
Because I'm coming up. I'm coming up.

Fuck.

I'm

 

Oh.

 

I'm

 

coming.

++

**PETER**

Shit. It's dark.  
Where am I? Where the fuck did I go?

Oh man, I gotta get back. I gotta get back out there. They're going after Roman.  
Fuck, I can't see shit. I must be out of my body?

No, wait, I'm in here somewhere. I can feel the vargulf's legs. They're messed up and it hurts, but that's okay, it's just meat and bone.

I just can't feel myself in here.

This is really weird.

Is it because of the heart? Did Blinsky do what I said?  
Did we win?

If we didn't win, then I don't wanna wake up.

Shit, I'm stuck. Why can I even think this? I'm in here talking to myself. Why?  
Mom. Destiny. If I'm with you, give me a sign. Please give me a sign. I don't wanna be alone.

I wait for something, a whisper, a giggle, a pinch. But Destiny isn't where I am. Guess I'm not dead.  
And maybe Mom's just too far away.

Roman, are you there? This ethereal shit can get weird, so maybe you can hear me. Don't freak out, man.  
I think you're here, but I can't see, can't hear.

Okay. I just took a breath. I think I took a breath.  
Something's lifting.

Yeah, that's gravity, man. That's fucking gravity I'm feeling.

Whoa. I can feel it in my Anahata rather than my Swadisthana. Like I'm upside down on the inside.  
Goddammit, if I'm ever getting out of this wolf, Roman's gonna have to pull me out of its ass.

I can see something glowing, kinda yellow.  
Hundreds of lightbulbs. No. I've seen this before.

Jellyfish. Hundreds of jellyfish in the sky.

Somebody's died.

++

**GODFREY INDUSTRIES, LABORATORY S5**

Sweat poured down Blinsky's face, into his eyes where it stang, but as long as he could see, he wouldn't lift a finger to wipe them.  
He had two defibrillating pads in his hands and he had been putting them to the reshaped heart sitting in Roman Godfrey's chest cavity for sixteen minutes now, shocking it at steady intervals.

_Zap. Thud._

Roman's long, cold body would jiggle a little, but even a day-old corpse would react that way. There was nothing, no sign of reanimation.

Blinsky had absolutely no idea what to expect anyway. There were theories that upir hearts only beat when they were feeding.  
He didn't think that was entirely true.  
He believed that upir hearts in fact galloped where normal hearts would merely trot. That their powers required far more oxygen than a human would.

But that gallop would only kick in when they were using those powers.  
Hence the nosebleeds.  
Hence the acute cardiac arrest that Roman experienced when he hypnotized the giant.

Moving with dream-like repetition, Blinsky put the pads to the heart again.

_Zap. Thud._

He had connected all the blood vessels as best as he could. There were two arteries in Roman's chest that remained loose ends. Blinsky had never seen those in any mammal, and he had stapled them shut and hoped to Jehovah that they were not critical to upir anatomy.

He felt he was personally pounding on the gates of Hades. An absurd errand. There were no stories to be told here. Here all cautions ended, because there was only darkness here that nobody willingly ventured into and nobody came back out of.

_Zap._

A wishing well that never answered.

_Thud._

He leaned back on his heels, eyes closed, mouth open beyond exhaustion, a wordless prayer that only a desperate god might wrinkle its nose at.

"Wake up," he croaked.

A light on the ceiling flickered.

But it had been doing that since two weeks. They'd been meaning to have it fixed.

Blinsky sighed. He looked at Roman's face. He had cleaned the blood from the nose, so that it would not obstruct his breathing as it clotted.  
But Roman didn't look like anything that would breathe again.

God, he wanted this. He wanted it for Roman, for Peter. He wanted it for himself.  
A miracle, like the ones Johann had performed here. That's what Blinsky wanted, needed. Just one.

He checked his watch. Its metal links had bitten into his wrist. Likely because his arms were swollen. Hours of meticulous, ridiculous, impossible heart surgery, followed by entering calculations into the computer, followed by this.

His trembling fingers were starting to uncurl from their grip. The grand demon sultan of all repetitive strain injuries. He wondered if he would ever operate again.

As steadily as he could, he placed the pads on the heart again.  
His thumb wouldn't squeeze the button at first. The tendon simply refused.  
"Come on.."

After a pathetic twitch, his thumb finally obeyed and Blinsky pressed.

_Zap. Thud._

It took him a minute to register, to accept, the simplest of realities. That nothing happened. Just like the other times.  
And he couldn't anymore.

Blinsky turned and almost let the defibrillator pads slip and drop to the floor, barely managing to stumble to a medical cart before his fingers gave way and let go.  
The pads crashed onto the metal plating with a noise like an orchestral cymbal and it shocked him into a sudden burst of tears.

He let out a whimper that couldn't become a wail. Too tired.  
He just stayed leaning against the cold metal of the cart, propping himself up while his sorrow passed.  
After a minute, his crying stopped, and he kept his head bowed down, slowly letting the truth trickle into his brain that there would be no miracle for him.

Those died with Johann Pryce.

Blinsky's eyes opened a little.  
And he began to steady himself, wincing at the cramps in his hands, but he managed to get to his feet, straighten his back.  
His self-pity ebbed away and the electric current of an idea propelled him to the next room in the lab, elbowing the door open.

Pryce.

Pryce's mind.

It was here. Right here, on a cluster of solid state disks. The disks had been stacked together to host all 4 petabytes of data scanned from Pryce's brain.

Frantically, Blinsky used his elbows and knuckles to start up the computer interface connected to them.  
He and Pryce had elaborately argued about whether human consciousness would be copied along with the contents of the brain in a data transfer. It had ended with Pryce calling him an infantile slave to tradition.

Blinsky breathed deep, trying to calm himself. Maybe that was indeed what he was.  
Maybe that was why he would never make a miracle.

His mind could never soar like Pryce's. Yes, Blinsky would stand on top of high, breathless peaks of genius, but he never dared jump into the unknown beyond.

The interface whirred to life. The screen turned blue.  
Perhaps the time for genius had passed. Now was the time for insanity.

Just when Blinsky's spirits crumbled again as he realized that there was no way his numb, aching fingers could operate the keyboard, a voice called from behind.

"Doc?"

To Roman, Blinsky must have looked like something out of a Hammer horror movie, vest spattered with blotches of brown blood, grey hair frayed like a bird's nest, eyes miles away.

He, in turn, had a similar impression of Roman, who stood in the doorway, naked, pale and absurd, clutching a hand to the muscle that pulsed obscenely in his open chest.

It was impossible. It was a miracle.

"You shouldn't be up," he heard himself say from somewhere in the back of his brain, where things were light and where it didn't matter if anything made sense or not.

Roman nodded, slightly cross-eyed.  
"Can you fix this?" he drawled drunkenly, indicating the gaping wound in his chest.

Numb and stupefied, Blinsky nodded. Stiffly, he walked over to Roman, hands out-stretched in support.  
Not a second too soon, because Roman's legs gave way and he collapsed onto the doctor's shoulder with almost his full weight, making Blinsky scramble to keep the both of them afoot.  
So cold. He was so cold.

With a grunt, Blinsky forced his knees to straighten so that he could stagger back into the other lab with Roman Godfrey's body propped up on his shoulder.  
That was a chore in itself. Roman's body was heavy in the unexpected way that skinny, tall people were heavy.

"God... what... test is this?" Blinsky breathlessly mumbled to himself, spit flecking his dry lips.

On his way to the operating table, he managed to brush the light switch with his arm and the lab smoothly glowed to life.  
He had dimmed the lights because his eyes had begun to sting like ammonia.

Just a few steps more to the table.

Suddenly, Roman's head gave a slight upward jerk and his eyes again tried to focus, like an automaton on its last batteries.  
"I'm.. suh.. sorry I'm such a fuck up," he slurred, "I juss.. I just want everyone to.."  
Something warm began to spread on Blinsky's shoulder. Blinsky looked and saw that dark blood was spilling from the corner of Roman's mouth, onto his shirt.  
"Don't talk," he whispered.

Roman grunted in response. He was trying to drag his legs along.  
As they approached the operating table, he frowned at the wolf carcass that lay on the floor, near the bed. White fur no more.  
"Peter?" he mumbled.  
"It's okay," croaked Blinsky.

The wolf's back legs were mangled. Its chest was a hole.  
Roman winced. _No._  
With a push, Roman tried to untangle himself from the doc's grip. "Peter.." he sputtered. He was choking on the fluids climbing up his throat, but he leaned desperately towards the corpse.  
Blinsky tried to steer the boy away. "Roman, don't.."  
"What.." spat Roman, "What is..." He lurched, tried to stand.  
"Roman, please."

There was no reasoning.  
Roman spat a gob of thick, dark blood. "Let me go.." he barked with the throat of a chainsmoker.

Then the stern tip of a needle pressed against his neck, slightly bending before puncturing the skin and smoothly sliding into his flesh, and everything faded.

++

**PETER**

This is taking too long.

There's supposed to be light at the ends of tunnels. I think I've been going for five hours and I'm still not seeing shit.

Destiny told me something about this. If you're stuck, you're using the wrong legs to walk.

Well, my legs. I can't feel any of 'em.  
I'm just sort of.. swimming. And there's something pulling at my ankle.

I want to look down, but first I have to project myself as a body. Can't quite figure that out yet. The vargulf really did a murder on my self-perception.

Fuck yeah, finally. Something like eyes begin to set in my face.

 _Blink._  
I blink.  
Yeah.

Alright.  
Now look down.

My foot is somewhere between wolf and human.  
Looks like a cheap eighties horror movie prop, but it'll do.

Wrapped tightly around the ankle, several times around it, is some black twine.  
No. Hair.

Black hair.  
Same thing I pulled out of Roman.  
Oh, that's bad voodoo.  
I gotta tell him. Somebody's been witching.

It's nasty stuff too. Cuts into my ankle.

I reach down for it. _Damn, is my hand really that hairy?_

Okay, I've got it. I wind it around my index and middle finger a bunch of times, so I don't lose it.

And I start pulling.  
It's like being underwater. Or in space.  
I pull myself along, deeper into wherever it is. Guess I'll find out.

I look up. The glowing jellyfish are almost out of sight. They're just little dots now. Like a cluster of stars that are packed too close together.

Soon, I have to look back over my shoulder in order to see them.  
When I look ahead again, I'm in a living room.

Fancy. Lots of wood-panelling.  
An extinguished fireplace.  
One wall is almost completely covered in mounted heads, mostly of animals.

I look at my hands and I'm still holding the black hair.  
It leads across the floor, across the rug, to a man standing next to the fireplace.

Some unholy terror creeps into my balls. He sees me.

++

**GODFREY INDUSTRIES, LABORATORY S5**

Blinsky hoisted Roman's body onto the operating table, cold skin slapping against colder metal.

The legs were left dangling over the side until Blinsky bent down and, with a groan, lifted the pair of gangly limbs onto the table as well.

He winced.  
His back felt like a crumbling fossil, but there was no resting now.

The heart was in place. He watched it twitch and heave right before his eyes, pumping a mixture of real and synthetic blood through Roman's veins.

Blinsky had always found the sight pleasantly hypnotic. Soothing.  
He wasn't sure what to think now. There was a major risk of rejection, but the fact that Roman had woken up - hours before that should have been possible - and had walked around - weeks before that should have been possible - was cause enough for careful optimism.

Blinsky sighed. He snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves.  
It was time to finish up.

++

**ROMAN**

I'm in the dream again.  
We're on the rusty walkway of the old steel mill. Peter and I.

He's leaning his arms on the railing and looking out over the river.  
It's colder than I remember.

I look into the water with him.  
The sorry, soaked carcass of a bird tumbles along the rocky stream.  
We follow it with our eyes until it disappears and we look at each other. The sun is making us squint.

Peter looks at me, then down at my chest. His eyes are beautiful.  
"Is that blood?"

I look down.  
A circle of blood presses through my shirt. Ourobouros. The snake eating its tail.

"We're in this together," I say, smirking just enough to mean it.  
Then I cross my arms and pull my shirt up over my head.

I look down again and my chest is spread open, a circle of something like plastic spreading my flesh apart, and my heart is violently contracting, squeezing, pumping obscenely. A loop of pornography.

Peter blinks in that gypsy way of his that makes him look all shy when he's actually already got his hands down your panties.  
He's saying something that I can't hear. And now his fingers are reaching out to my chest.

 _What?_ I try to say, but I can't hear myself either.

Then his fingers touch and the sky cracks apart.

++

**PETER**

This guy's eyes. Cold marbles.  
I know them. I've seen them look at me, through Roman.  
He's the one. The hunter.

If he's surprised to see me, he's hardly showing it. Thin lips curled into a frugal smile.  
The top button of his shirt is undone and there's a smell of leather in the room.

I focus on my heartbeat. Breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth.  
Guy's like 50 or something, but he's pretty ripped. Back straight like a door hinge. Definitely not some prick sitting on a horse blowing a horn, letting a bunch of clueless beagles do the work for him.

He's moving around the room. Circling.  
Guess that creepy smile is all the introduction I'm getting.  
The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up. Guy's making sure that I see his hands. Showing me his strength.

I breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

The cologne on his wrists is covering up another smell. And that other smell is making the hair on my back stand on end. The smell of other people's terror.  
There's torture in those hands, maybe from just minutes ago. His knuckles crack, fresh from squeezing the adrenaline out of veins like pus.

The sound of his perfect shoes clipping on the floor boards is making me a bit drowsy. Each of his steps is measured with effortless, practiced casuality.

He stops, very close but just out of my swinging range. The hunter stands there, exhales purposefully and he allows me to take in the fact that he's maybe a head and a half taller than me.

"The fuck you want?" I ask, ready to take a step back if he takes one more forward. The closer he gets, the harder it gets for me to keep my eye on all his limbs and what they're doing.  
He's got the higher ground. I've got nothing.

When he speaks, his voice comes from all the wood in the room and it's like the sound is curling in around me, groaning like bent timber.  
"This place is mine. What do _you_ want?"

"Nuh-uh." I scratch the side of my nose with my finger. " _I_ asked. You tried to fucking kill me. Now _y_ _ou_ tell me why."

The guy ponders this, pouts.  
"I think I did more than try."  
His hand gestures at the room and I flinch, only a little. But a flinch becomes a blink. And shit, I'm off my balance now. He's taken over the conversation.  
"Peter... the only way you can be here, in this room, is by projecting your spirit. And the only way to do that is by a lifetime of practice, or..."  
He shrugs.

It's a distraction. But it kinda works, because I'm starting to think of the stuff that I remember.  
The faceless giant looming over Roman, while I watch from the floor with my legs pointing in all the wrong directions...

And I realize I don't know what happened after that. My mind is slippery, blurry. And every time I try to push for more of that memory, I just slip back down to the same moment: me on the floor, the giant, Roman.  
My heart jumps in my chest and I don't want to be here anymore. _No._ _Oh fuck_ _._ _Roman._

The hunter's hand comes down and I somehow let myself collapse in such a way that it just swipes the air next to my ear.  
But then I'm on the floor and elbowing my way backwards across the boards, while the fireplace suddenly bursts to life and red flames cast a shimmer across the walls.  
The mounted heads glare down at me.

The hunter stalks, looms over.  
"The best problems are two that solve one another," he says.

My shoulders are pressed against something hard. There's no more backing up.  
"Like a snake eating its tail," I pant, and I glare at the jagged, diagonal patterns of the wooden floor.

The hunter kneels over me. "That's right."  
He waits till I look up before he punches me hard in the face. My nose explodes. There's a copper taste ringing in my mouth.

Takes me a few seconds before I can say something that makes sense. I think two of my teeth are loose.  
In between drooling blood, I ask "Who are you?"

The leather smell comes from him. It's even stronger than his cologne.  
"Who am I? What does that matter? Why do people always want to know? Does the knowledge make what comes next more acceptable?"  
The hunter frowns. I can count the pores in the folded skin of his forehead.

Destiny.  
_Breathe,_ she tells me.  
So I breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

"I guess.." I cough, almost choke on my own whisper. The hunter leans the tiniest bit closer. "I'm a pretty sensitive guy."  
With all the force in my throat, I hook and spit the blood from my mouth into his eyes.  
His hands jerk up to his face and he lets out a surprised grunt as he reels back.

He gives me just enough room between us for me to boot him beautifully in the stomach, my heel almost crushing his solar plexus and sending him flying back and crashing on top of a small side table.

Don't have time to enjoy it. I almost twist my fucking knee trying to get up. Layers of wood polish upon wood polish. The floor is like a soap slide.

And the room starts to tilt. The floor becomes a wall, and the wall with the mounted heads becomes the ceiling.  
I just try to scramble along with it, but I'm a bug in a bottle, tumbling.

A deer's glass eyes glare at me, and then the deer's head turns towards me and a bunch of the other ones do too, and the hunter starts to talk through their dessicated mouths.  
"Gypsy scum. You're dead. You and your faggot upir boyfriend are dead. Your lives are nihil. A couple of sores dripping pus. Never heal. Never heal."  
And they all start barking, mewling, crying, each mounted head joining in with its own death rattle or whatever last sound they made before dying.

I'm yelling too. The room starts tilting the other way and I crack my back against a hard wooden armrest.  
_Destiny. I can't find you. Where are you? I gotta get out of here._

A boar's jaws open wide and raise its dry old tusks in silent laughter.

I'm really fucking trying, but I can't keep my feet stuck to one wall or floor. I try to picture myself as a bug, a fly, but he keeps breaking my focus.  
Or maybe I'm just freaking out because Roman's dead. Because he's never coming back.

Then this is Hell.  
I don't think I should leave. I don't think I want to. Roman is dead. I belong here alone.

A knife slides neatly underneath the skin of the back, just under the shoulders, and I try to scream when it begins to move, cutting loose connective tissue and efficiently separating my fat from my muscle.  
It's the hunter. He's begun to flay me.

I try to hold out. I really try. Ride the pain, I tell myself.  
Call me a fucking pussy, but I can't.

I try to get up, move, roll sideways, but the weight on my back is immense. Can't do anything to stop it now. I'm pinned down and I'm being peeled like an orange.  
Some memory drunkenly swims into my consciousness, of my arm extending, offering half of the dripping piece of fruit to Letha. I yank it away before her lips can touch.

I think the hunter's saying something.  
The knife scrapes against my bone like chalk on board. Tendons get cut loose from their life-long duty and they eagerly snap into little stubs.

I can feel my ribs. I'm a turkey.  
Mom, look. Look at me now.

Then it all stops quite suddenly.  
"What.." the hunter whispers, somewhere above me.  
The knife is held still, stuck somewhere in some piece of my flesh that's so displaced that I can't figure out what part of me is hurting.  
"Where the fuck is it?" the hunter demands, outraged.

Shock has just started lulling my pain away, but I sure as jimminy fuck can't answer him. What the hell is he talking about?  
I look at my fingers, pale and numb, limply clutching the floor.

The hunter scoffs in disbelief. "The heart," he hysterically howls, snarls, barks, drooling on what's left of my back, " _Where is_ _your worthless fucking gypsy nigger_ _heart?_ "

It still takes me a few seconds before my lungs start to quiver behind my ribs, because that's what laughing looks like when you're a turkey.

++

**BOYD'S BEDROOM**

"You. And you. Both full of shit," said Boyd flatly, his head slightly hunched between his kimono-draped shoulders.

Legs cross-linked in a slack attempt at a lotus position, he sat on top of the bed, vaguely aware of how this whole scenario - girl walks in on him with a dude - played out a lot different in real life than it did in his more vivid dreams.  
A little tremor ran through his butt, even now, ten minutes after the gypsy had pulled his cock out. Boyd wondered if it might not be too late for dreams to come true.

Jeri had gradually made the center of the room her own, and she stood there, one bare calf hooked behind the other, thumbs hooked into her shorts.  
Yes, it was a little too cold for shorts already, but she weirdly liked it when her legs got goosebumpy.

She pursed her lips, shrugged. "I don't know if you've noticed, but this place.. the town, I mean.. is like a fucking Tim Burton movie or something. I know that _you've_ seen weird shit." She nudged her elbow in the direction of the gypsy, who was leaning his ass against Boyd's desk.

"Vampires are real," the gypsy chipped in, smiling broadly. His faded white Bruce Springsteen shirt - one of the few things his daddy left him - hung so low that he was basically sporting cleavage.

"So are your mom's tits. Can we move on to who the fuck cares and why the fuck you're here?" scowled Boyd, sulking, totally knowing this was some retarded in-joke that was playing out far too long, but he didn't know how to break it off without losing what was left of his cool.

Jeri scratched the side of her nose a little. "Something's outside my house. Even if it's just a rapist and not a werewolf, I wasn't gonna sit there and wait."  
She smiled faintly. "And I don't know anyone in this block but you. Sorry."

Boyd nodded with pensive aggravation.  
"Could've knocked," he said softly.

Jeri scoffed. "You take five years to come to the door. I wasn't gonna get werewolf-raped on your doorstep!"

The gypsy rapped his fingers against the underside of the desk.  
"Did it follow you?" he asked.

Everyone was quiet for a second.  
Boyd felt a thrill. He felt that he was letting himself go along with this crap, really wishing these things were real. Ever since he was six, he liked horror movies. He missed those times. He missed the fear. For the sake of it, he was willing to suspend disbelief.  
Besides, he enjoyed the nervousness that the question caused in Jeri.

"I don't know," she replied with taut levity. "Do you guys wanna come check?"

Boyd rather found himself checking her thighs. His boner, abruptly struck dead by his embarassment, was giving signs of life.  
"Can I slip into something less faggish first?" he tweaked at his kimono, which he wasn't wearing as much as it was draped over him. It was the most comfortable, sensual thing Boyd had ever felt against his skin, and he loved it dearly, but properly wearing it - tying that belt into a fucking bow - just made him uneasy.

Jeri shrugged. "You'll be fine. The wolf only kills girls."  
Boyd still ignored her eyes in favour of her thighs. "So far."  
Over at the desk, the gypsy was putting a ring back on his finger. "Could be a different wolf," he said.

Jeri was a little mesmerized by the gypsy's fingers. "I guess. I just don't wanna find out either way."  
She paused. "Did you guys see anything? Hear anything? I mean, the window's open."

Irritated, Boyd sighed. "No, I didn't see anything, I was busy. So what are we gonna do? You want us to walk you home or call the cops or whatever?"

"Hey, I'm on a schedule," the gypsy protested.  
"No, you're fucking not," said Boyd.

"You got a gun?" Jeri cut in.  
Boyd looked at her, baffled. "No," he scoffed with some outrage.  
"You?" she turned to the gypsy.  
The gypsy shook his head, picked a cigarette out of a scuffed, crushed pack.

"Don't fucking light that in here," Boyd bit at him, "My mom smells that shit from a mile away. Gonna get me grounded."  
"Wasn't gonna," the gypsy said and he stuck the cigarette loosely between his lips, "But maybe now I will."  
"Quit fucking baiting me, man. I'll throw you out the fucking window." Boyd stared hard.

The gypsy looked back at Boyd with beaten dog eyes, letting the cigarette hang limply. "You're not gonna throw me out of anything. I'm taller than you."  
Boyd hopped off the bed, nearly forgot that he was not really wearing the kimono and he hastily snatched the fabric together with one hand before it could slip off him. He looked fabulous.  
"Light it then, asshole. See what happens," he said to the gypsy, raising his free hand, middle finger up.

The gypsy snorted.  
"What?" demanded Boyd.  
"You look like the Statue of Liberty."

Boyd dropped the finger, sighed.  
Jeri chuckled.

"Fuck all this," Boyd said flatly and flung the kimono onto the bed. Naked, he marched right at Jeri, who was alarmed because she thought he was going to hit her, but he just stomped past her, out the door and down the corridor.

Jeri and the gypsy stayed in the room, looking at each other, listening to Boyd rummage around.  
"What's he doing?" Jeri asked.  
"Getting his pants, I think," the gypsy replied.  
Jeri lifted her chin in acknowledgement. She thumbed at the belt loops of her shorts. Then she looked at his feet. "Where are your shoes?"  
The gypsy raised his eyebrows, looked down at his toes, wriggled them. "Out there too," he said, jutting his chin at the corridor. "That's where we started."  
Jeri smiled, a little giddy that she was made privy to this information.  
"I'm Alison," said the gypsy.  
"Alison?" Jeri was a bit taken aback by both the abrupt introduction and the name itself.  
Alison blinked affirmatively, the unlit cigarette still in his mouth. "Yeah," he said, "people think it's a girl's name, but what kinda girl's name ends in _son_? Do _you_ think it's a girl's name?"  
Jeri hunched her shoulders a little. "Not really."  
Alison leaned forward and stuck his hand out to her. "Good," he said, "Besides.. you're Jeri, right?"  
Jeri simultaneously frowned and smiled as she shook his hand and behind her eyes flashed the image of that same hand clasping Boyd's pale hip. It caused her thoughts to drift and hold on to that hand a little longer than she meant to. And when she realized, she still wasn't too quick to let go.  
"Yeah. Have I seen you.. somewhere?" she pondered.

"I'm afraid not," Alison smiled. His smile was both kind and mean. Jeri liked it.  
He took the cigarette out of his mouth and offered it to her.  
She stared at it, hesitantly took it. "Thanks. Mind if I keep it for later?"  
Alison shrugged. "Mm-hm." His eyes then shifted to the open door behind her as Boyd appeared, twice as pale as before.

Jeri turned around to see Boyd now wearing tracksuit bottoms and one shoe, the laces undone. It took a while before Boyd looked at anyone.  
"You okay, man?" asked Alison, the concern in his voice the most tender and sincere thing Jeri had heard from him so far.  
Boyd looked at both of them for a while in a blank stupor. Then he slowly broke into a shy, incredulous grin. "There's a wolf in my backyard," he said.

++

**GODFREY INDUSTRIES, LABORATORY S5**

When Roman woke up this time, Doctor Blinsky had curled up on the bed that his patient had previously occupied. Roman couldn't see him from the operating table, but he heard him lightly snore.

It was dark. The lights on the ceiling had been dimmed to a ghostly glow that threw shadows where your eyes wouldn't expect them.

But Roman didn't see those yet. He lay still and looked up at the glow. He didn't think much. His head hurt a lot.

Two times he tried to remember where he was. Not just where he physically was, but in his memory. All of his thoughts felt in the wrong order.  
He tried to remember what had happened, but the grey mass of his brain punished him with an unbearable pin stab each time.  
Under his back and arms, the paper sheets crisped with each slight movement.

So Roman tried not to frown or move anymore and just stared up.

The lights on the ceiling were just lights. Just lights on a ceiling.  
Their glow was soft and kind, almost golden.  
Like jellyfish in the sky.

Like jellyfish.

In the sky.

That meant something. Maybe it was important.

Consciousness climbed up the ladder from Roman's eyes to his brain.  
It brought pictures. And then voices.

He listened to his own breathing for a while. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.  
It felt right that way.

Roman exhaled. He listened to the echo of his sigh until it was gone.  
Then he opened his mouth. It was time to use his voice.

There was a soft crack in his throat just before he began to speak. Everything felt virgin.

"Help."

He waited for a reply.  
In the meantime, he tried to overcome the blurriness of his sight.  
He blinked very slowly, holding off as long as his eyes could stand to be exposed to the dry air.

"Help."

The snoring from the other side of the room continued without heed.  
Roman called on his right arm to carefully begin a propping-up motion.  
The paper sheets crinkled and shifted and his skin touched the metal underneath, which was so cold that he recoiled.

He realized his skin was burning. From inside. From his veins. It was his blood.  
Webbed out from his toes and fingers through his limbs, his waist, his stomach... endlessly, mercilessly pumped by his heart.

With a hiss and a panicked jerk, Roman sat up, a little too quickly. His brain screamed.  
Uttering a series of short, restrained cries, he clasped both hands to his temples, pressed hard until his teeth could stop clenching.

When it passed, Roman looked down at his own chest, the vertical scar in the center. He decided not to touch it.  
There was a bit of a buzz in his head now. Was he feeling _good_?

He blinked and lifted his head to look in the direction of the snoring.  
Blinsky's mouth was open. He looked like total shit.

"Doc," Roman called out. His voice broke, but it was enough.  
Blinsky startled out of his slumber with a jolt and his hand jerked up and quickly wiped his mouth. Squinting, he sat up.

"Roman," he muttered dazedly. The man clearly was miles away.  
A clot of grey hair stuck to his forehead. The rest of his hair was a drunken bird nest.

Roman and he both sat and studied each other for a moment, quite sure each of them mirrored the way they felt and looked.

There was a bad smell too. Something burnt and something rotten.  
Roman wrinkled his nose. "What is that?" he croaked.

Blinsky just stared back at him. Or maybe through him.  
Eventually, Blinsky answered. "I burned them," he lilted, like a child uttering its first.

Roman straightened his back, alert and worried. "Burned what? Burned who?"

Blinsky stared at him again, opened his mouth.

Recent events were racing through Roman's mind, busily trying to park themselves into the correct order. "What the fuck happened, doc?" he called out, loud enough to make his own ears ring.  
He shifted his position so that his skin wouldn't directly touch the surface of the table anymore. His already hot skin felt like it was boiling whenever it leaned on the cold metal.

Blinsky pointed. "Them."

Roman looked at the far corner of the lab, where a set of large cabinets had almost collapsed, but now they just leaned coffin-like on each other in support, arching sorrowfully over a huge, charred mass, partially covered with several white sheets.

It took some creative squinting before Roman identified something sticking out from the mass as an enormous shoe.

His eyes filled with recollection. Roman clutched his fingers to his chest, faster than a reflex.  
"Where's Peter?" he immediately asked.

Blinsky was raking his fingers through his hair in an effort to comb it into something presentable.  
His hand stopped mid-scalp. "Peter," he muttered. Then he looked away, confused.

Roman froze when the last memory finally sunk in.  
The pink, eyeless mess of a face that leaned over him. And behind it, the clack of wolf claws scrabbling on the smooth floor.

With a lurch that came from his gut, he swung his narrow, trembling legs over the side of the operating table and almost sent the rest of his body spinning and crashing down, but he clutched the burning metal edges and managed to steady himself.  
Now sitting sideways on the edge, he could see the floor next to the bed that Blinsky was on.  
There was blood there. And streaks of something, maybe fur. No wolf, no Peter.

No no no.  
"Where is he? What did you do? Where the fuck is he?" Roman's arms were stiff from the heat in his veins. Sharks swimming in lava.

Blinsky's mouth was still open, but it opened a little more before something behind his eyes snapped in place and, like a switch had been flipped, he got up off the bed, wincing when he put weight on his right leg.  
Then he started to walk. "Wait here," he said and he was about to march right past when Roman's hand lashed out and grabbed him by the sleeve of his labcoat.

"No. Tell me," Roman commanded.  
Blinsky halted, looked at him. "He's in there," he muttered and he pointed at the door that led to the other room.

Roman looked at the door.  
He felt immediately empty.

He wanted to tune out from this moment, this whole so-called present. If he stopped existing right now, at least he could cling to not knowing for absolute certain. At least he would still have this unanswered question. At least he could take with him the possibility that Peter was still alive. Schroedinger's wolf.

"I'm sorry," whispered Blinsky.

Shit. Forget Schroedinger.  
Peter was dead. He was behind that door. This was the end.

"No," said Roman. His voice trembled. That irritated him. He breathed deeply. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

Roman hopped off the table and his feet almost exploded when they hit the floor. He doubled up and his mouth opened wide in soundless agony.  
Then he lifted his head and started walking regardless.  
Blinsky tried to offer his hand, but Roman shrugged it off curtly.

With stiff, agonizing strides, he pounced towards the door, pushed through it and found the wolf's body lying perfectly still on a gurney.

From every corner of Roman's mind, whispers came with intense, urgent advice.  
_That's not Peter._  
_It's stuffed._  
_It's fake._  
_I'm dreaming._  
_He's not dead._  
_He's in a coma._  
_I'm dreaming._  
_He'll be fine._  
_None of this happened._  
_There are things science can't fathom._  
_I got him back before._  
_I can get him back again._

"He saved me," Blinsky's voice said from behind him.

Roman said nothing. He walked up to the dead wolf with its mostly white fur. He noted there were patches of grey too.  
_Is a vargulf supposed to be white all over? Does this count?_

Roman gently laid his hand on the wolf's flank. He felt the ribs. Exactly the same ribs he had laid his hand on other times before, except with colder skin in between.

He moved his hand up to the wolf's shoulder, then slowed down and stopped just behind the ear.  
The eyes were open. They looked so calm. Not like they'd seen death.  
And the mouth was open too, just a little. Roman could see the pink of the tongue.

He knelt, brought his head close to the wolf's head.  
The breath from his lips brushed along the fur of its cheeks, the nose.

"Peter. I'm here," he whispered, "I'm not gonna talk to you like you're dead. I know you're here, man."

Roman sniffed. He didn't want to cry. Crying's for funerals. This was not a funeral.  
He got closer, closed his eyes, pushed his forehead into the soft bristle of the wolf's temple.

"You gotta hear me. I don't give a fuck what you're doing in there. You gotta listen."

His voice remained steady, even as he sniffed again and a tear rolled from his cheek into the white fur.

"See, I'm crying like some asshole. Fuck that. Peter. You're not fucking done. You gotta listen. Listen, okay? Maybe you're really deep down in there where you are, but you gotta come out. Don't get fucking comfortable. Come out of there, man."

Roman draped an arm over the wolf. He pressed as much of his burning self against its cold body as he could.  
He squeezed his eyes shut, blacked everything else out.

"Come out. Don't make me say please. I will, but not for this thing. Come out, Peter. If you don't, I'm going in there and I'm gonna fucking pull you out myself."

The black behind Roman's closed eyelids turned to dark red... then lighter red... and then black again.  
And then black.

++

**PETER**

Peter was pretty much ready to die. Not that he was suicidal or anything, but this felt like a good moment. Peter had met a lot of people and he felt he had done more with his short time than most of them.

He had fucked up real bad, in ways he'd rather not think about.  
As his astral body was getting ripped apart by the hunter, he thought about his mom, about Destiny, about Christina Wendall whose morbid interest in him had secretly rather affected him, about Nicolae and how unreal it felt when his head rolled onto the grass.

Peter wondered if this is what it felt like getting sucked into a black hole, molecule by molecule. Each little bit plucked, detached from him.  
It made him sad. It was such a waste.

One more time, he stretched out his senses, but he couldn't find his body anywhere. There was just a whole lot of space and nothing.

He had always liked his body. It wasn't very tall. But Peter hadn't let anyone make him feel short.  
His eyes, they were okay, he guessed. Girls definitely thought so.

And goddamn, it had only been so recent that he'd started to appreciate his beard. He'd never really thought of it as a beard. It was a little short for that.  
Peter had figured he'd one day grow it longer, whenever he'd be a man and not a kid.

He thought about Letha. And then about Nadia.  
Shit. Nadia was gonna be an orphan. Well, on one side anyway. That sucked.

Some abstract part of his spirit shrank in on itself. He wished he'd fought harder for every moment. He was losing them all now.

His physical heart was in a good place at least.  
Peter felt it.

He wished he could see Roman, but he was also afraid to.  
Maybe he could haunt him a little. Hover over him when he was sleeping. Maybe actually read Roman's dreams now.

Nah. Peter never really wanted that anyway.  
He was happy with whatever Roman would tell him. Even if it was just "fuck off".

Peter thought he'd like those words on his grave. He grinned and his spirit rose a little before the knife of the hunter sliced clean through his cheeks and the top half of his face fell to the floor with a soft splat, like one half of a melon.

The lights dimmed.  
He panicked, resisted when he realized that he still kinda assumed that those lights would be coming back to wake him up again in the morning. There would be no dawn this time, for the first time.

Shit. Peter had loved the sun and the moon equally. Big fucking rocks in the sky that had been there for him when he wanted to be alone.  
Even if the sun wasn't really a rock.

The hunter hacked at him still, with rigid, staccato stabs.  
What the fuck was he doing this for? What a fucking asshole.

As a result, Peter was all over the place. What had been a living room with a fireplace and mounted heads was now a shredded mosaic, pieced together by his imagination. It was like seeing through a badly cracked mirror.

But from this bizarre compound view, through the shards of his perception, Peter became aware of a new presence beginning to appear in the room.  
Whatever it was, it was very bright.

And when he realized that it was Roman, he suddenly managed to focus, to look...

The top half of his face lay on the wooden floor and the eyes opened wide and turned.  
His ears were mostly there too. Peter watched, heard.

Roman's skin was fire. It bubbled like stew.  
And his eyes were blue, yellow and red at the same time. Indescribable.

The hunter appeared to be confused. He stood across from Roman, stammered something, raised his knife.

Roman said something back, in a voice that wavered like a singing saw, but that was because his voice was part of the fire.  
It was the most fucking beautiful thing Peter had ever heard or seen or whatever and he wondered how the fuck he could die now, knowing all this.

Everything was muffled and scattered, but Peter could've sworn he heard Roman actually say "fuck you" to the hunter right before he put his two long-fingered, flame-roiled hands on the hunter's temples and either whispered or screamed something, Peter wasn't quite sure, but what definitely was sure was the sea of flames that burst out over the entirety of the hunter's spirit body.

The hunter's eyes rolled back or exploded or something and his mouth opened in orgasm and basically broke his own jaw as it wrenched open far beyond what any mouth could.

Then, after a while, it was over and Roman let go, leaving the hunter to slump to his knees, with his skin blackened and broken, his hands gnarled and slowly, feebly clawing at nothing.

Peter's eyes blinked up from the floor. Smoke and tears blurred his sight.

Roman turned to him, to the pieces of Peter lying around.  
To Peter, Roman looked normal now. The fire was out. Well, maybe not out, just somewhere else.

The walls of the room were still smoking and most of the mounted heads too. The whole thing looked like a freeze frame from a forest fire.

Peter couldn't find his own mouth. He needed to say something.  
From where his eyes were, Roman looked like a colossus towering over him.

A few feet away, Peter's limbs twitched. His fingers curled and groped in the dark, knuckles rapping against the wood.

Roman heard and he turned and knelt beside the flayed-open mess that the hunter had left.

Peter's eyes only saw Roman's back now, and his own pair of legs weakly pulling, heels kicking.  
All of this was framed by the light of the fireplace.

Then Roman, still kneeling, looked over his shoulder, right back at Peter.  
"I hope this doesn't hurt," he said. His eyelid fluttered.  
Peter could only look and blink. Maybe there was something like a glint or a pupil reflex that Roman could read.

Roman looked for another few seconds before he turned his head back to Peter's body. There was a familiar fleshy popping sound when his jaw dropped and stretched.

Peter felt hands on what remained of his skin, and they pressed down hard just as Roman took as large a bite out of his flesh as he could. Peter wasn't sure if it hurt; his nerves had been physically shredded to shit and were sending out all kinds of mixed messages.  
But it wasn't very good either to feel a large chunk pulled out of himself.

Roman ate fast and his eyes stared blankly ahead. Peter knew that look. Roman had moved his thoughts somewhere else, so that he wouldn't choke or cry. The bigger the bites, the sooner it would be over.

Everything just felt far away.  
Every few seconds, Peter noticed some faint tugging at his insides. And he felt a little lighter each time.

The last thing Peter would remember of this was when Roman ate his right hand, along with a good part of his arm after long teeth clipped it neatly off just below the elbow.  
After that, no portion of his body was really large enough to matter anymore.

Later, Peter would tell Roman about it, because Roman never dared ask.  
He told Roman how it had felt like being a jigsaw puzzle of meat, like some kind of gingerbread man, and that it hadn't hurt; it had pretty much been like getting hacked apart in a dream.

Even later, they would crack jokes about it, and then sometimes feel a little bad about doing so.  
Then, after a hug, they wouldn't feel so haunted anymore.

Later still, they would joke about it a bit less, simply because it had been a long time ago. They'd still hug though.

++

**GODFREY INDUSTRIES, LABORATORY S5**

Since Roman had leaned his head against the dead wolf body and drifted off, Klaus Blinsky had twice carefully pressed his fingers to Roman's neck.  
Both times, he had registered a normal pulse. A strong one, he was pleased to observe.

He had pulled up a desk chair and sat there, trying not to fall asleep.  
He scratched his beard and thought about his wife and about his daughter. The urge to charge his depleted phone and send them a message was still there, an itch in his chest he had to push away.  
Every time his thoughts wandered to them, it was another hook in his heart.

His eyes were dry slits.  
"Wake up," he droned balefully at the Godfrey boy.  
He might have whispered it, but he didn't care anymore. He wanted to get out of here. He needed to see clouds, smell cars, hear the sound of things moving forward.

He closed his eyes.

++

Roman woke up with a snort, a gasp and a wild flail of his arm. His wrist whacked hard against the edge of the table.  
The shock and pain of that helped him get his bearings.

He was in the wheelchair.  
The wolf was right in front of him, on the table, still completely motionless.

Roman stared at the corpse.  
It was stone cold dead.

_No. No fucking way. Peter?_

Roman's heart instantly went from trot to full gallop.

 _That was no dream. I was somewhere. That was real. Peter was there, and the fucking hunter. I did something..._  
_What the fuck did I do?_

Roman lurched to his feet, out of the wheelchair, and realized he felt sick.  
More than sick.

Something deep in his gut vibrated all the way up to his stomach.  
A cramp like an icepick. He bent, clutched at his stomach, bent double.

Something was coming up. Roman's mouth opened. It was all he could do. Whatever happened, it had to happen.  
He coughed, gagged, stared blindly at the floor for a second, then gagged again.

Not much more than clear fluid came out, but Roman kept retching.

_Fuck. I'm.. Fuck. Choking._

"Help," he wheezed meekly as he dropped to his knees. Panicking, he looked around. Through his water-stung eyes he saw Blinsky slouching in a chair, passed out. Too far away.

Roman couldn't get up anymore. The thing in his stomach was just passing a corner and all he could do was try to bend with it, accomodate it.

"Hhh..." was all the sound he could make. A long line of drool connected his lip to the floor.

His heart pumped. Tears and sweat gathered on his cheeks.  
His arms gave way too and he just collapsed in a rather graceless heap on the cold laboratory floor.

When the black finally drew over his eyes, Roman felt two more things before he lost consciousness: relief, and the muffled click of his jaw unlocking.

++

Roman immediately woke up again, all healthy and dressed sharp in his CEO suit.  
He wasn't sure where he was. The walls didn't mean much, just a blur that he couldn't look directly at.

Peter sat in a lotus position, right there in front of him, hair brown, black shirt and jeans. His fingers trapped a cigarette.

"Hey man," he said.

"Hey," said Roman, aware that the fog in his brain was gone. For the first time in a long time, he felt he could stretch his limbs in there.  
It was so jarring that Roman didn't know what else to say.

Peter leaned forward, looked him in the eye.  
"Sorry.. did I wake you?"

Under Peter's scrutiny, Roman immediately felt the illusion of his sharp CEO suit begin to waver.  
He felt exposed. Liked it.  
"No," he said, "I'm sleeping. This is a dream."

Peter's eyes glanced around the room that wasn't there.  
"I'm in your dream?"  
He chuckled, toked on the cigarette, blew smoke that instantly became one with the walls.

Roman smiled. He felt strangely safe, strangely powerful.  
"Don't think much of it. Mi casa, su casa. It's the least I can do."

Peter frowned, then hesitantly leaned forward again, this time to offer Roman the cigarette.  
Roman took it and Peter leaned back.

"You sure about that?" Peter asked pointedly, "We did some fucked up shit. And you killed Destiny. You killed her. I don't know if I can be here, Roman. I can't even look in your eyes without seeing her."

Roman blinked in shame. The mention of her name gutted him. Made him wish he wasn't so fucking tall.

"Don't say you're sorry," Peter said, "I'll fucking break your face."

Roman forced himself to look Peter in the eye.  
Then he painfully swallowed whatever he had to say and took a slow, awkward toke of the cigarette.

"I'll get her back," he said.

Peter scoffed. "Right."

Now it was Roman who leaned in. "I know where she is. We gotta get her body here to the lab and that guy, Blinsky.. he can do it. And if he can't, then I won't fucking stop until someone can."

Roman saw hope flash in Peter's eyes.  
That was it. He had placed the seed. And with it, possibly the anchor that would sink him to the bottom if he was wrong.

"You serious?" Peter asked.

"Fuck yes," said Roman, "I loved her."  
He had meant to say _liked_ , but it just came out like that.  
His long arm extended the cigarette back to Peter, who took it and immediately took a deep drag.

"Is that why you killed her?" Peter asked, then looked away.

Roman shook his head stiffly. He missed the comfort of the cigarette already.  
_It was an accident_ , he tried to say, but he didn't. He'd broken her neck.

"No," he muttered, "I don't know, Peter. I didn't want to. It was.. It went fast. I didn't know what I was doing."

Peter nodded tersely, still not looking.  
"Alright," he finally said, "Alright. Then let's get her back."

Roman looked surprised. "Yeah?"

Peter climbed to his feet, cigarette between his lips. When he stood, he extended his hand to Roman.  
"It's your idea. If you say it's possible, then let's get out there and do it."

With a lurch in his stomach, Roman took the hand.

Peter pulled him up. "And then," he said, "we're gonna find the fucks that did this - all of this. And then I want you and I to eat them alive."

Roman blinked. "Who? Did what?"

Peter smirked impatiently as he began to drag Roman by the hand, somewhere into the grey. "We'll talk about that. But let's go get a burger or something. I'm fucking starving."

++

Just a few inches away, Roman was asleep.

Peter breathed slowly. In through the nose, out through the mouth.  
He brought his head closer to Roman's.

If he touched him, he might wake him up.  
But if this was about brain waves and stuff, maybe being really, really close was enough.  
Destiny had told him he was good at picking up vibrations. (She'd also told him he sometimes sucked at interpreting them.)

Peter's eyes were as good as closed. He tried to clear his mind, grateful for the soft daze of sleep that cloaked him.

He imagined Roman's brain, just a skull and some skin away, crackling away right here underneath him, all peaceful on the pillow.  
_What if he wakes up?_ his own mind insisted.

As clear as day, Peter saw those big, intimidating eyes open, and he didn't flinch. Sure, the pitch of his heart went up a little, but he didn't stammer, didn't try to come up with an explanation.  
The moment lasted for a full two seconds before Peter realized that Roman's eyes had really stayed shut, and it had just been a trick his mind played on him.

Still, it had unnerved Peter, and he slowly began to move back, his hands retracing his steps across the unsteady surface of the mattress, feeling Miranda's nipple brush against his ribs as he did so.

When he finally coiled back onto his side of the bed, facing the other two, he felt disappointed.  
The sheets only made him feel more naked.  
Peter closed his eyes, though behind his eyelids, he would still be seeing in the dark for a long time before he finally slipped away.

++

Klaus Blinsky was in a half-awake state. He was delirious, hallucinating freely. The clock felt like it was ticking backwards and he kept getting jolts of anxiety, thinking that he had fallen asleep mid-surgery.  
He hadn't eaten since the attack had left the elevator out of order. Also, he hadn't slept for days, except for very brief moments of dozing.  
So when he saw Peter Rumancek returning to this world, he just didn't have it in him to react appropriately anymore.  
The scientist in him was aware he was looking at something insane, and he more or less forced himself to observe through slits of eyes, maybe process it all later.  
His lips moved by themselves, going through the motions of cursing, praying, questioning. No sound came from them.

So when Peter lay naked in a slippery, pink puddle on the floor, and Roman was on all fours with rolled up eyes and his jaw clacking wildly as it tried to find its way back to normal, it appeared as if the bizarre rebirth had gone completely unnoticed.

But Blinsky had seen.  
He clung to semi-consciousness right until the end of it all, when the shivering baby with the long, brown hair began to uncurl itself and clutched with its hands and shivered and moaned.  
Then Blinsky knew he had seen everything that he could and nobody could have possibly blamed him for sinking back into a near-comatose sleep, right there in that desk chair.  
He dreamt of ice cream cones and eyeless monsters.

++

**BOYD'S HOUSE**

"It was there, behind the swing."  
Boyd, still shirtless, pointed vigorously.

Jeri squinted and peered through the window. So did Alison.

The lawn was a mess. If anything like a wolf had trodden on the patchy, tufted square of grass, it was impossible to see from up here.  
What they could see was that the frame of the swingset was so covered in rust that only a few flecks of paint told that it had once been orange.

Alison shrugged, shook his head.

Jeri still looked down through the fog-stained glass, but her thoughts wandered back to half an hour ago, when her gym shoes had pounded on the asphalt, her throat choking itself from the inside. Without slowing down, at every corner that she turned, she had thrown a glance back over her shoulder and there had only been the empty street.

Now, here, that same absence continued to unnerve Jeri.  
She kept looking at the swingset, her mind superimposing the wolf prowling around it.  
"What did it look like?" she asked.

Boyd's brow drew together with exasperation.  
"Like Spongebob. What the fuck do you think it looked like? It was a fucking wolf that looked like a wolf."

Jeri let half of her annoyance breathe out tautly from her nostrils, and left the rest of it in her reply: "Fuck you, Boyd. With that stick up your ass, what do you still need _him_ for?"

"Hey," said Alison flatly.

Boyd sighed. "Can we shut up and focus on the wolf in my yard? Right. It was.. black or grey, I guess. Or brown. It stood right there."

Jeri ignored him, pulled her phone out and turned away from the window.

Alison was idly rubbing his lower lip with his thumb. "And where did this black or grey or brown wolf go?"

Boyd scoffed, but his irritation had no edge. His pupils shone big and black with exhilaration. "Fuck do I know. Wolves have legs. They have freedom. They go places. They don't just stand in someone's backyard for hours like a retard."

Alison smiled and he reached out a hand and petted Boyd's hair for a second until Boyd ducked away.

Jeri budded in between them, her phone held out in front of her. "I'm calling a friend who knows wolves."

++

**GODFREY INDUSTRIES, ON THE FLOOR**

Roman woke up first. He blinked, felt the hard floor under him, pushed himself up.  
The queasy vapor of medicine drifted in the air around him.

Roman was on his knees now. With a hungover moan, he brought his hands to his face, rubbed his chin and cheeks. His jaw ached like he had sucked the world's fattest cock.

Then he saw the other body lying on the floor, glistening and spasming, and Roman forgot about his jaw and crawled right over to it with feverish urgency, his limbs stiff and stilty like a crab.

"Peter," he rasped, leaning close to the head, which had sticky strands of hair draped over the eyes and nose.  
Carefully, Roman wiped the hair out of the way.

The eyes were already open, already looking at him.  
And the lips trembled a little, but they spoke.  
"Roman? What the fuck.."

Roman let out a ridiculous, high-pitched single syllable of a laugh. It crossed his mind that it must have looked pretty weird, since his jaw and facial muscles weren't quite operational yet and so he looked almost entirely expressionless. He was glad it didn't appear to alarm Peter.  
"Can you move?" Roman asked him. It was as good a question as any.

Peter managed to twist himself into sitting up.  
Most of his skin was still dripping.  
"Yeah, I.. guess," he said.

Roman reached out a hand.  
"You alright? You're shaking, man."

Peter looked around, looked at his arms and hands. Then, in a sudden bolt of panic, he jerked his head to glance over his shoulder. Whatever he feared might be there, it wasn't, and he cautiously allowed himself to breathe.  
"I'm okay. I'm just cold, I think."

Roman nodded, started to look around the lab. "There's some clothes somewhere here. Doctor stuff, probably. Wait, I'm gonna--"

"I dreamed about you," said Peter, his eyes wide and white among the pink-streaked film on his face.

Roman had started to shift his weight, about to try and get to his feet.  
But now he stopped.  
He looked at Peter, and he realized he had gone some way towards accepting the white hair, which was now a familiar brown again.

"I dreamed about you too," said Roman.

Peter shivered, frowned in disorientation. "Yeah, but I think I was really there. This guy was cutting me up..."

Roman remembered, winced. "The hunter."

Peter paused, tried to put to words what he had seen, what had happened. Even the memories felt like fever dreams, hot to touch. "What did you do? You did something."

Roman shook his head, shrugged.

But Peter was adamant now. "You toasted him," he pushed on, "With your hands. You grabbed his face and.." Peter's hands went through the motions, exploding an invisible head with his shakey fingers.

Roman chuckled rustily. "No way. No way, man. That wasn't.. I think that was a metaphor."

Still trembling, Peter sat up. "No. I remember it exactly. I saw it."  
The way he sat up gave Roman a flash of déjà vu; the way Peter leaned towards him, the two of them closing out the rest of the world, cocooned in their own conspiracy.

For a second, Roman was zoned out, lost in a different moment. Then he muttered: "If you say so."  
He didn't mean to sound dismissive, so he shot Peter something that Olivia had once mockingly dubbed his bad puppy look.

But Peter had picked up something in the air. "Somebody run a barbecue in here?"

Roman scratched his hair, which felt surprisingly clean. "You could say that."  
He knew it had been Blinsky who had burned the dead giants, and Roman would gladly explain this to Peter, but his brain didn't want to talk.  
It didn't want to do anything until they got out of here, out of the lab and into life.

"I wanna go home, man."  
The words startled Roman, because it was Peter who'd said them, duplicating his own exact sentiment.

Roman nodded. "Wherever that is," he added under his breath.  
He still barely dared look at Peter, for fear of him not looking back.  
From what glances Roman did steal, Peter looked just about as lost as himself (not that he meant to presume).

"I don't know if I can walk," muttered Peter, his hand sliding out and away from him in the puddle of pink fluid that he was still sitting in.  
He reached out and grabbed Roman by the upper arm. "Can you.."

Roman could. "Hold on," he grunted, and he scooped a hand around Peter's side, but that part was so slippery that he couldn't get a grip, so he forwent the flank for the hip.

Peter's legs trembled as he tried to rise, looking much like a newborn foal.  
"Goddammit," he cursed.

"Lean on me, lean on me," insisted Roman, he himself actually feeling pretty strong. Well, his body seemed strong anyway. It just didn't feel very his yet.

With an uncertain push, Peter tried to lurch up to a standing position of sorts. His muscles were taut, freshly made. Young and stupid.  
"Shit..." He stumbled into Roman, who had no choice but to grab him by the ass in order to prevent them both from crashing back to the hard lab floor.

Once Roman had lifted him up enough for both of Peter's feet to find their own balace, he carefully let that hand slip back up to the hip. "You good? Can you stand?" breathed Roman.

Peter stayed still while he tried to feel the strength in his calves. He shivered through a grin. "I think my dick just touched your dick."

"I bet you say that to all the girls. Shut up and put your arm around my neck," said Roman.

Something rumbled its way up Peter's oesophagus, and his shoulders convulsed in a series of slimy coughs until he spat out some thick, pink phlegm.  
Roman somehow managed to keep the both of them on their feet.  
"You alright?" he inquired, concerned.

Peter nodded and slowly turned to maneuver his arm around Roman's neck.

That gave Roman a brief glimpse of the top of Peter's back.  
For half a second, he was lost in the simple perfection of his spine, the light bulges of bone trailing down the middle of him.

 _T_ _he pattern of_ _his_ _vertebra_ _e_ , his brain commentated uselessly as he took the arm and let their weight become one as they slowly, staggeringly began their walk.

++

"The rise of a dragon: imperious"

\- D.T.

♫ _Weyes Blood_ _-_ _Seven Words_


	4. Episode 4: The Way Through

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I gloriously missed the January deadline. Shit happens. Here's episode 4 at last. Let me know if I'm still doing it right.

**BLINSKY RESIDENCE, HEMLOCK GROVE**

Now and for the first time, Ariel felt weird about eating with her hands.  
But after five days without a word from Dad, Mom had finally lost the nerve to cook. So they ordered pizza and sat on the fat beige couch in the lounge and got tomato and baked flour stuck to their fingers.

Ariel couldn't really enjoy the pizza. It felt wrong and indulgent to be eating with her hands while Dad was gone.  
Mom felt the same. Ariel could see there was no appetite in her.

Yesterday, Auden had kicked a ball around in the hallway, and even though nothing got knocked over, Mom had given her a mouthful for it. A little too much maybe. Tears. Mom had felt bad for the rest of the day.

The tv was showing reruns of The X-Files, but the volume was turned down so low that Ariel had to strain to hear what Mulder was whispering in Scully's ear.

Mom seemed to be watching it just fine. At least, she was looking in the direction of the tv.  
Ariel's toe poked at a loose thread at the edge of the carpet.

Both their phones lay on the table, next to the remote.  
A message on Mom's read that Auden would be staying the night at a friend's.

The pizza turned cold fast.

They ended up feeding whole slices to The Void.  
The Void was a black cat that Ariel had found nine years ago on a rainy afternoon, cowering in some bushes near Orchard Road. She'd lifted the soaked feline into the wicker basket attached to the front of her bike and pedalled it home, where she successfully bartered its adoption.

The cat's lustful greed at the pizza offerings managed to get a smile out of them both.

"With all that grease, I think we just cost him one of his lives," murmured Mom.  
"Nah. He is The Void. He is without bounds. He is the All-in-One," chewed Ariel through her anchovies, "There'll just be more of him."

Mom gave a dull smile and watched the cat lick its paws before it sniffed at the remaining crust. "Gabe's leaving next week," she said, "He got an offer in Delaware. Let that simmer in your saucepan for a second, honey. People are preferring Delaware over this place now."

That would make Gabe the second of Mom's friends to move out of town. And a third was packing up her stuff and getting ready to move back in with her ex in Jersey.  
Hemlock Grove was draining.

Ariel felt more and more like they were the sole inhabitants of an ever-shrinking island.  
She paused and picked something out from her teeth. When she looked what she held between her finger and thumb, it turned out to be a small piece of fish tail. She artfully hid her own distaste, so she could show it to her mom, who made wide eyes and shook her head. Ariel then flicked it at The Void, who made short work of it.

"Nobody gives a fuck anymore," Ariel said, shoving the rest of her pizza back into its box. "Did you know a cop killed himself last week? Or this week maybe, I dunno."  
Mom looked at her. "No. I didn't know that."  
Ariel stuck her fingers in her mouth one by one, getting the pizza off them. "He drove his car in the river and then shot himself. In the stomach."  
They looked at each other skeptically.  
"Who shoots themself in the stomach?" Mom gesticulated with her last lukewarm slice of pizza still in hand, "And why the river?"  
"Exactly," said Ariel. She immediately felt more at ease when people asked the right questions.  
Mom proceeded to think out loud: "Maybe he tried to drown himself, but changed his mind."  
Ariel frowned. "And then went for a shot to the gut?"  
Mom shrugged. "Honey, men do things that leave you thinking there's no hope for this world. Even when there's no one watching."  
Not quite the revelation that Ariel was hoping for, but she nodded anyway.

"I should drive by the office," Mom sighed.

That ran a thrill down Ariel's belly.

Dad had explicitly messaged them not to go near the Tower until he'd come back. And he'd said that he might be gone for a few days ("two, maybe three").  
This was the first time Mom even brought up the possibility of breaking that protocol.

"I'll come with," Ariel said with flat conviction.

Dad was like clockwork. If he had to pull an all-nighter, they would know when and for how long, if not always why.  
Dad freely admitted that lying to family was an encouraged policy among Godfrey employees, especially those with high access levels. But he said that this was for people who trusted their boss more than their wife and kids. Dad didn't lie to them. He just couldn't tell them everything.

This had always frustrated Mom more than it had Ariel, whose detective bones were tickled by all this corporate secrecy.  
As she became a teen, she'd started to rationalize that she probably was enjoying the chase more than the catch. Her daddy wasn't Frankenstein. What was hidden in the Tower's laboratories was probably some new food coloring or a protein centrifuge. At best, they were colliding particles.  
Ariel told herself she was better off not finding out what was actually hidden in the laboratories of the Tower. She'd let the mystery feed her imagination.

For years, she'd shared her theories with her friends Jeri and Malena. Most of those theories were pure, wild speculation based on little hints that she had managed to wring out of Dad.  
But reality often had a way of catching up with Ariel's theories. She'd started dreaming things too. Especially after the Brooke Bluebell murder.

Mom was torn for two seconds before she decided it was much better to have her eldest in the passenger seat of the car than home alone on an increasingly gloomy evening, in a season where people disappeared and strange new things were spotted in the woods and river.

"Fine. Fine. Let's go," she said.

Ariel veered up. "You get the coats, I get the rat."

"No rat," protested Mom, but Ariel had made sure she was out of earshot before she'd finished her own sentence.

When they convened outside and closed the front door, Mom could only sigh gravely at the sight of the white and brown patched face that the rat stuck out of Ariel's coat pocket.  
"Keep him in your other pocket if you know what's good for him. Come on, get in the car."

"It's a her, not a him," sighed Ariel. She fished the rat out of her left pocket, cooed at it "You heard the boss, Moriarty", and carefully helped the curiously sniffing rodent down her right pocket before she got in the passenger's seat.

"Seatbelt," commanded Mom, while she turned the key and their modest-sized SUV rumbled its obedience.  
Ariel buckled up and looked eagerly ahead into the dusk.  
At night, the streets around here looked like the ramps of some enormous alien craft with its lights dimmed. Though Ariel was concerned, it still managed to give her a thrill tonight.

They pulled out and headed towards the eerily perfectly laid roundabout, which had always disturbed Ariel, because all the exits looked exactly the same. Even when she was little, she'd never dared ride her bike in the direction of this hauntingly featureless carousel, afraid that she would not find her way back. She had dreamt of exploring it though. But she never remembered what happened in those dreams.

The streetlights cast a rhythm of pale flashes against her window. Ghost lights.

"To be real with you, baby.. I don't know if I'm gonna want you to come in with me or stay in the car," Mom droned. Whenever she was driving, her voice got this soothing, flat quality to it that precisely fell in line with the hum of the engine.

"I'm coming," said Ariel matter-of-factly.

"Well, we'll see," Mom said. She sounded like her thoughts were not exactly where her voice was. "Your father doesn't make a fuss, you know. But I just keep picturing the place covered in yellow tape. That's me thinking the worst, but I can't help it. It'll be okay, I know it will. You're just gonna witness your mother being an idiot and then we'll all go home and warm up that pizza."

Ariel looked at her mom, at her knuckles pale on the wheel. She probably shouldn't have told her about the cop. But at least it probably helped freak her out just enough to get her in the car.  
"Hell no. If Dad's coming home, we're getting fresh pizza. Hawaiian," insisted Ariel, "Unless you're gonna find him banging the secretary."

Mom's lips curled into a slightly hurt smile. "What do we get him if he's banging the secretary?"

She turned the SUV into a long, narrow road, lined with poplar trees. As they drove, it looked as if they were heading down a funnel.

"Artichoke," said Ariel, "Artichoke tastes like jizz."

Mom snorted through her smile. "How would you know? As if you've ever tasted artichoke."

Ariel gawped at her with disbelief and raised her voice. "I have sailed the seven seas of cheese and savored the _infinite wonders_ beyond its horizon. So don't.. even.."

Her voice trailed off gradually as her eyes focused on something that seemed to stick out from one of the approaching poplar trees.

Ariel couldn't finish her sentence. Her eyes were too busy trying to deny what was rapidly becoming impossible to.  
Clutched to the side of the tree was a titanic brown spider. The sheer enormity of it was evident from the fact that Ariel had already begun to glimpse it from forty feet away.  
And it was on her side of the road. And the car got inexorably closer, as if she were aboard some unstoppable carny ride.

It was not an oversized tarantula. More a recluse type, with a bulging, egglike body from which the legs sprouted.

The closer the car got, the more details of the thing's appearance unwantedly registered with Ariel, whose face and eyes drew pale.  
Yet she couldn't look away, not even to figure out why the hell Mom wasn't slowing down the car.

"What.. What! _What!_ " she shouted, then shrieked as they passed by the tree, close enough to see its grape-like eyes shine at her among its brown bristle.

"What?" echoed Mom, alarmed and slowing down the car, "Oh my god, what is it? Did you --"

"Go! Drive! Keep going!" yelled Ariel, kicking her foot down as if she had the gas pedal on her side.

To the mercy of her thudding heart, Mom did, and the car sped up.

Ariel's hands trembled and only the realization that Moriarty was about to tumble out of her pocket made her come back into her self slightly.

"Honey, are you okay?! What happened?" Mom insisted, now steadily making her way up the freakout ladder herself.

Ariel finally dared look in the side view mirror, where she saw nothing but road and trees, and rain starting to fall.

"Dad's in trouble," she said, teeth gritted as she turned to Mom, who saw her eyes and solemnly pressed her foot further down on the gas.

++

**GODFREY INDUSTRIES, LABORATORY S5**

Peter became increasingly aware of just how much he was leaning on Roman right now.  
Everything was no longer exactly spinning, but more like a gentle skewing that threw him off-balance every little while.

"It's fucking cold here," he blustered through chattering teeth.

Roman was already busily scanning the room for a blanket, a spare labcoat, anything. "I think they've shut down the heating of this floor. It's got its own wiring, but not its own gas," he said, himself not really feeling hot or cold or anything.

The two of them made for a bizarre sight for no one to see. Naked, smeared in glistening pink and red, the longer-haired one leaning on the other who was a head taller, together barging step by stumbling step through the laboratory.

Blinsky was out cold. Roman had tried to wake him, but to no avail.  
So it was just the two of them then. Peter wasn't entirely comfortable with how comfortable he felt with that.

"Here," whispered Roman hoarsely. He pulled out a large sheet of thick, transparent plastic and tried to wrap it around Peter.  
Peter frowned, trembled. "Gonna give me nipple burn," he hissed.

Roman chuckled a little as he finished wrapping and closed the two ends together with his hand. "Like a hairy springroll."

"Fuck you," said Peter softly, already shivering less. "What about you?"

Roman shrugged. "I'm fine. Wait here. I'll find a coat. And I'll get the chair." And he staggered off, leaving Peter standing in his floppy, plastic container.

He came back a minute later, pushing the wheelchair ahead of him and smiling apologetically. "Sorry it took so long. Here."  
He grabbed a crumpled white coat off the seat of the chair and extended it to Peter, who stiffly freed himself from the plastic sheet and accepted it.  
"Thank you."

Roman helped him into the coat. It wasn't even awkward.  
He also offered to get him into the chair, but Peter found himself warming up already and he easily sat himself down in it, with only a slight tremble in the knees. "I just gotta sit for a while," he groaned, "You go and wake up the doc. I'll be.. over here."

Roman nodded, turned, but hesitated.  
"I gotta find some pants or something," he muttered, then started walking anyway.

Peter smirked.

++

This time when Roman knelt before the doctor and shook him, he managed to get a drowsy moan out of him, followed by one hesitantly opening eye.  
"Doc? Wake up, we're getting out of here."

Blinsky frowned, rubbed his eyes.  
"What time izzit."

Roman wondered that himself. Moreover, he wondered what day it was, what month.  
"I don't know," he carefully enunciated at the doctor's face, "Please, you gotta help us get out. The elevator's broken and Peter really needs to get out of here. We all do. Don't you wanna see your wife?"

That seemed to get to Blinsky.  
"Melissa," he droned. Then he nodded. And he kept nodding for a little too long. "We gotta.. go. There's a... whatsitcalled.. stairs." He weakly lifted his arm off the armrest, and Roman quickly took the man's hand before it could flop back down.

"Come on, get up," said Roman, and began to lift Blinsky to his feet.

++

While Roman was in the next room, Peter had been desperately looking around for anything to drink. His mouth was dry and tasted of metal.

He spotted a strange faucet with something like a sink under it, but when he wheeled over there and opened it, it just gurgled for a second and didn't surrender a single drop.  
Roman had mentioned that somebody had turned off the gas. They must have been cut off from water as well.

_What the hell's going on? Didn't Roman own this place?_

Just as Peter thought this, Roman bumped open the swinging door and staggered into the room with Dr Blinsky dangling off his shoulder, looking like a scarecrow.

"There's an exit," breathed Roman, "A secret exit. This way."

Peter wheeled after them, past the covered-up pile of burned giant, past the smashed elevator doors.

Then Roman spotted what must have been Blinsky's coat hanging from a hook. He snatched it and quickly put it on himself.  
He turned to Peter expectantly, spreading his arms out.

"You look like a pervert," acknowledged Peter.  
Roman smiled. "Works for me."

Blinsky had managed to find some degree of footing. And now he - barely audibly - instructed Roman to remove a panel from the wall.

And indeed, when Roman forced the panel off, there was a smooth metal handle. Roman pushed the handle down and a tall, narrow door creakily swung open, revealing a small hidden room with bare concrete walls and a spiral staircase leading up. It smelled musty and damp.

Roman stuck his head in and looked up. "Alright," he gawped. He tried to see if he could catch a glimpse of daylight, but the stairs just spiraled away into darkness.

Peter took a deep breath and lifted himself out of the wheelchair. His muscles ached like hell, but he had gathered enough strength for their final escape.

Blinsky leaned against the laboratory wall and seemed to be dozing off again.  
Peter nudged him. "Stay with us, doc."  
The doc didn't react, so Peter snapped his fingers a few times, right up close to his face.  
Blinsky frowned with irritation. "What time izzit," he moaned.

Roman was inside the dark alcove already, listening for sounds, people, anything. It was quiet except for the echoes of their own whispers and foot shuffling, which bounced off the walls, all the way up, up into the dark until they couldn't be heard anymore.

Peter stood just outside the doorway, and Roman's eyes turned to him, wide and bright like an owl's.  
"Get in," he whispered, the softly spoken words instantly becoming a chorus of fluttering moths inside this tower of echoes, "I'll carry the doc."

Peter nodded and stepped inside. The floor was cold dirt, which bothered him less than the cold laboratory floor. In fact, he instantly was relieved to feel something like soil on his soles. The feeling swirled its way up into Peter's belly and saturated his Swadisthana. Made him feel real.  
He looked up the staircase, squinting. "Where does this go?" he asked Roman, who was just reaching past him through the doorway to grab Blinsky's sleeve.  
"Up. Out," said Roman, giving him a glance that showed he didn't want to think of the answer too much, "I hope."

Blinsky suddenly protested and lurched one step back. His sleeve slipped from Roman's fingers. "Wait. Wait, wait. I.. uh.. there's something.. I must bring."

Roman bit his lip, swallowed his exasperation; the man had saved them both after all. "What is it? Tell me what it is and I'll get it."

Peter, meanwhile, kept staring up into the darkness. Was there something left up there that he wanted? Was there something that still wanted him?

If he was getting out of here, he felt he'd be dragging along a whole goddamn warzone with him.  
He thought about the look in Roman's eyes, the fear that was always there, even when he laughed. The imprint of that fear was in all of his emotions, indelibly merged. Peter had long hoped he could laugh the sorrow out of Roman's eyes, one car ride, one stupid song, one gravedigging adventure at a time.

Peter felt that if he looked into a mirror now, he'd be seeing the same thing in his own eyes.  
The spiral staircase stared blindly down at him.

Peter spat on the floor, defied it. "Fuck you," he mouthed, then turned to see only Blinsky in the doorway.

Peter frowned, demanded: "What's Roman doing? What's he getting?"

Blinsky's reddened, sore eyes peered back at him. "Pryce," he rasped.

++

**MALENA**

Drops of water tick tocked into the full bathtub.

Malena's consciousness heaved up to the front, and this time - with a loud gasp that echoed off the bathroom tiles - she took control of her body and opened her eyes. Immediately, she coughed. The bathroom was dense with steam.

In between coughing, she groaned. Her neck ached. Everything was stiff and sore.

She tried to pick herself up from her slouching position. Malena could already feel that the floor had left some neat, red tile grooves in her butt.  
She grunted miserably.

Then she became aware of the jangly alarm sound of her tablet, which she had left lying on top of the clothes hamper.  
For how long had it been going off?

Slowly, she got her spine back to life and managed to turn and make a crawl for it. By the time she reached it, the alarm had stopped.  
One elbow on the hamper, she blinked the fog out of her eyes and read the time.  
"Sshhhhit..."

She staggered to her feet, grabbed a big towel and pressed it against her bosom as she unlocked the door and quickly stuck her head out.  
Nobody in the corridor. Some tv sounds from downstairs.  
_Good._  
Malena shut the door again.

This normally meant that her parents had not come home yet. They'd been going to many parties lately, leaving Malena and her sister home alone, which everyone was fine with.

She dropped the towel and switched the airco on, hoping to quickly turn this sauna back into a normal family bathroom again. Maybe then spray the air a bit, to make it seem like regular girl stuff had been done in here.

There was a buzzing sound. It was Malena's tablet, still lying on the hamper.  
Someone was calling.

Malena leaned and picked up the tablet.  
It was Jeri.

Now that Malena was looking at the screen properly, she noticed this was the third time she was trying to call, and there was a stack of messages saying things like "where r u", "PICK UP" and "save me u asshole".

Malena's thumb hovered over the green button, then tapped it.  
Immediately, Jeri's face filled the screen.  
"Lee? You home?" Jeri squinted. She got so close that her nose looked almost like a beak.

"Uh, yeah, uh.. Bathroom," Malena stammered.  
Malena hadn't noticed the incoming call was a video call, so she quickly scanned her arms for any of the black thorns, but of course there were none.

"You gotta help us, Lee.." said Jeri, then put a hand over her eyes, "Oh god, are you taking a dump?"

Malena cut her off: "I'm not having a shit. I'm not having anything! I'm.. Wait wait, who's _us_? Where are you?"

Jeri moved her phone and Malena got a quick view of shirtless Boyd and some hot guy, both facing her, leaning their backs against a balcony. Boyd blinked a lot and looked nervous. Hot guy stuck his hand up and gave a quick wave.

Malena quickly moved her tablet a little higher up. She wondered if the guys had caught her boobs.  
Jeri's face came back into view.  
"We're at uh.. we're at Boyd's house," she said, "I think a wolf followed me here and now we don't know what to do. And your mouth's gone."

Malena carefully lowered the tablet again, bringing her face back in full view. "A wolf? What kind of wolf? Can you see it? Can I see it?"

Jeri hesitated. "Uh.. We're kinda looking for it. Boyd says he saw it, right here, in the yard. But I saw it first. After class, I walked home through the woods and it followed me.. I _think_ it followed me.. it was fucking scary.. so I ran over here and.. now I think it's here too."

There were two loud knocks on the bathroom door and then Nicola, Malena's sister, opened the door and stuck her head in. "What are you _doing_?"

In a flash, Malena shoved the tablet down between her legs, yanked a towel from the hamper and drew it ineffectively around herself. "Get out! Close the fucking door! Get out!" she yelled.

Intimidated, embarassed, unsure if she'd seen anything she shouldn't, Nicola hastily pulled the door shut again.

Malena still heard the tentative shuffle of her bare feet behind the door. "Go a-way," she droned commandingly.

The feet sulkingly marched off.  
When Malena stopped listening for their shuffling sounds, she realized how much her heart was thumping in her chest. All because she'd forgotten to lock the door. Nick could've caught her in the middle of... anything.

Malena picked the tablet up again. Jeri's face was turned away and was saying something to the guys.  
"Jer?"

Jeri's face turned to her, mischief sparkling in her eyes.  
"Uh, I think you showed us a little more than you needed to there, Lee."

Malena's throat tightened. She tried to keep her eyes still, but her heartbeat had just leapt up a notch.  
"What?" she whispered, "What did I.."

Jeri grinned. "If you're gonna put your tab between your legs, make sure you got it on vibrate."

Malena felt her lungs fill with relief. "Oh! Oh shit.. Did.. did anyone see?" she grimaced. Her shoulders still wouldn't come out of their knot.

Jeri pestered her by turning the cam to the boys again for half a second. "No one important. Nah, I'm kidding, it was all dark. But hey, about that wolf.."

Malena, glad to get back on topic: "Yeah, uh.. You said it followed you? What'd it look like? Was it big? Like a big dog...? Or bigger?"

Jeri chewed on her lip. "I don't know. I didn't get a very clear look. Boyd.."  
Her phone moved and shirtless Boyd came into view, still leaning against the coarse brick of the balcony, eyes black and glistening. His hand held a smoking cigarette and he nervously tapped it almost constantly, even when no ash had gathered at the tip.  
"It's a werewolf," he said with irrefutable matter-of-factness, "We got a werewolf here." He took a drag and turned his head sideways to blow the smoke out into the open air.

Hot guy next to him was smoking too, but he was droning something at Boyd, who in turn scoffed and shook his head.  
"I'm not fucking cold. I just saw a werewolf and I'm buzzed is all."

Hot guy smiled, faced the camera. "He loves animals."

Malena squinted. She didn't recognize him. Probably from out of town. Maybe.

Before she could smile back, Jeri's face was back on screen.  
"Uh, yeah.. so.. we're stuck here and it's getting really dark. And I thought you should know that we might die here tonight, and that... really sucks, because we swore an oath that we would get serial-killed together."

Jeri joked, but Malena felt a shiver anyway.  
"I'm coming over," she insisted.

"No fucking way!" Jeri exclaimed, "I'm serious. There's a wolf here. Maybe not a werewolf, but you know. Stay right where you are. We're just gonna wait it out. Don't call the cops."

"I never call the cops," Malena wrinkled her nose, a little offended.

Jeri pouted back at her. "That's why I love you. Listen, you gotta tell my parents that I'm at your place, okay? And if I die, tell them you're really sorry."

Hot guy's voice chimed in faintly from off-screen: "She's safe with us. We got this."

Malena frowned. "Who is that?" she whispered.

"That's Alison," said Jeri, "Weird, I know. He's a friend of Boyd's. Hey, I gotta go. We're gonna order pizza to see if maybe the delivery guy brings out the wolf."

Malena awkwardly chuckled. She wasn't always sure if Jeri's jokes were just jokes. Lately, nothing seemed like just a joke anymore.

\- "See you, shithead."  
\- "Don't die, monkey tits."

++

**IN THE WALLS, UNDER THE TOWER**

Roman paced himself. His bare foot was planted restlessly on the next step, shaking. The metal gnawed into his bare sole.  
His hand clasped the stone-cold railing as if it wanted to choke it.

Blinsky had gone up the spiral staircase first. Then Peter, with a small flashlight tied around his neck, which cast the three of them in their own weak bubble in the darkness.

Roman, with a small satchel slung over his back, had insisted he go last, in case something would come after them from below.  
If it were up to him alone, Roman would be bounding his way up, three stairs at a time.

The other two were weak and tired. They made their way up so slowly that it felt to Roman like they were going backwards.

His breathing was becoming increasingly intense. Anger hissed out between his teeth. Like something was fucking boiling in his chest, clawing at his throat, demanding to be spewed out.

Peter turned and looked down to him. "You alright..?" he croaked, exhaustion etched in his voice.

For a moment, Roman's eyes burned back at Peter with irritated rage.  
Roman waited for it to pass, nodded, tried to swallow the shame he felt about it. "I'm fine. You?"

He saw that the circular holes in the metal steps left prints in Peter's soles. Roman wished he could pick him up and carry him the rest of the way. The staircase was too tight for that though.

Peter heaved himself up one more step. "Getting there. I think," he groaned.

Their starting point, the bottom of the staircase was no longer visible. If Roman looked down, he'd just see the stairs gradually spiraling into darkness.  
But it was the same if he looked upward.

"Hey, how deep are we, doc?" Roman called out, relying on the echoes clamoring off the stone walls for his question to make its way up to Blinsky's ears.

Blinsky halted, taking it as an excuse to lean against the railing.  
"From this point..?" he muttered drowsily, "Uhh.. Oh man.. How far have we climbed so far?"  
The last word stretched into a long yawn.

Without looking behind him, Peter could sense Roman's exasperation, so he cut in: "How far below ground is the lab?"

Blinsky finished his yawn and thought.  
"Could be.. 100.. 120 feet. Maybe more."

Roman's breathing accelerated again. That was deeper than most churches were tall.  
No wonder the air smelled so fucking weird here in this no-end vertical tunnel. There were all sorts of bugs and things in these layers of soil that had never seen light. Probably would hate it.

"Goddammit," whispered Roman.

"Don't think about it," grunted Peter and he prodded Blinsky into motion.  
Blinsky quietly yammered something Yiddish under his breath before he willed himself to take on the staircase again.

"I'm not," said Roman, "I'm thinking about food. I'm fucking hungry, man. Like, not even funny hungry."

"Yeah, same." Peter's stomach was empty too. Of course it was. It was brand new.

Roman caught him taking a quick peek into the side of his labcoat and he knew that Peter was checking the tattoo on his ribcage, just to see if it was still there.  
Two summers ago, he had talked to Peter about what parts would always come back after he'd wolfed out. Why did his hair come back the same length? And his fingernails? Peter didn't know. _Maybe you should ask Destiny._ But Roman never asked Destiny.

Peter closed his coat around himself tightly. Cold.

There was a loud clang when Blinsky missed a step, stumbled, landed on his arms. The whole staircase trembled and the echo of metal groaned in the dark.  
Roman was ready to slip ahead past Peter to help him, but the doc already scrabbled back to his feet.  
"Okay, I'm okay," stammered Blinsky, hand help up.

Peter patted the doc's shoulder and looked back to Roman.  
"I think we need a break," he said, "Just a minute."

Roman nodded. "Sure."  
He bit his lip as he watched Peter and Blinsky carefully sit down on the stairs like a couple of oldtimers.  
Roman couldn't get himself to sit. His heels twitched.  
Everything was so clear. Even the dark. It was freaking him out a little and he wondered if his eyes looked as big as he felt they were.

Restless, he tried to watch Blinsky for a moment. The doc sat slumped, elbow hooked, forehead in his palm. Poor guy. Lack of sleep could lead to psychosis or something.

Roman sniffed, wiped his nose. He expected blood on his finger, but there wasn't any.  
He looked up again and encountered Peter's eyes pinned on him, tired and expectant.

Roman looked right back at him and instinctively groped into the pocket of his labcoat. He froze, smirked apologetically. "Left my smokes in my other coat."

Peter managed to raise half a corner of his mouth. "Yeah, me too." He took a deep breath, craned his neck. "I just wanna sit my ass down and eat. A lot. And then I wanna find my hammock."

Roman watched him, scratched a fingernail over the grainy metal of the handrail. "I'm not tired," he said, "I guess I'm all shot up with birth adrenaline or whatever and I just wanna get the fuck out of here, you know. How are your feet?"

Peter lifted one foot and angled it to expose his sole. "Fine. I'm used to not wearing shoes. I just feel like shit. My brain's mush."

"Want me to shut up?" Roman asked.

"Yes please," groaned Blinsky from behind Peter.

"Nah," said Peter, "Keep talking. I wanna feel like I'm here. Like I'm actually here now. What day is it? How long have we been gone?"

Roman shook his head, shrugged.

"Five. It's been five days," moaned Blinsky, "Maybe six. I want my wife. I want my bed. God." He hung his head back against the railing.

Peter tucked a lock of brown hair behind his ear. "Roman," he said.

"Yeah?"  
Roman looked up, eyes alert.

"Nadia. Do you know where she is?"

Roman blinked. "What do you mean? She's with you. She's with Annie."  
Roman felt his pulse increase. Oh, how aware he was of his blood. Except for his fucking daughter, that is.

Peter nodded. "Alright," he said, "Alright. I wasn't sure if you knew."

Roman straightened his back, used his tallness. "What the fuck do you mean you're not sure? Where did Annie take her?"

Peter tensed. His teeth gritted. He tightened his hand around the railing, ready to pull himself to his feet if he needed to. "She's with good people," he said, "She's safe. She's fed. I saw it. Nadia's fine. I would never.."

Roman breathed deep. Something felt very _off_. But it wasn't Peter.  
It wasn't Peter.  
"Fine," he whispered.  
Roman looked up the staircase again, as if he could will his eyes to see through the darkness this time.

With a sigh, Roman went up two steps and stood right up to where Peter sat.  
He stuck out his hand.  
"Come on," he said, "You've got a kid. Do you wanna see her?"

Peter took the hand naturally and thoughtlessly.  
And as Roman pulled him up, it was like a switch got flicked in Peter's eyes.

Roman saw it. He knew what just happened. It could never be helped.  
His veins opened in his body and flushed out all the mud in his head. The mist in which he walked: this ozone layer of anxiety and boredom, all stacked up to block out the sun, abruptly dropped like a veil.  
He felt sick.

So sick that he didn't let go of Peter's hand until it had become awkward and disgustingly glaringly obvious that something was broken.

Roman forgot about his fingers. They were somewhere on the end of his arm, a universe away. He just stood there like a vegetable, fascinated by how fucked up and sad and dead he felt.  
Why let go now? Might as well make it worse. Or better. Anything.

Finally, eventually, it was Peter who tugged his hand out of their grip.  
And to Roman's dismay, he felt his throat and chest close with the petty, leaden choke of jealousy. Or rejection. What was the difference anyway?  
Infantile scorn, worthy of Olivia.  
Roman breathed in deep, inhaled the damp stone smell of the stairwell, forced himself back in the moment.

Peter had already turned his back and moved up to the next stair. He looked over his shoulder, down at Roman.  
_You coming?_

Roman nodded and took the next step.

++

**SHELLEY**

Aitor was in the store, paying for gas and food and Mountain Dew.

Shelley waited in the truck, quietly playing a game of dare with herself. She promised she wouldn't check her phone for at least ten minutes.

Since yesterday, she had been staring at her sent messages, anxious to see if any of them had come through.  
Nothing from Roman. Nothing from Peter. Nothing from Mother.

She couldn't help it; it felt like punishment for her elopement. But Shelley had been ready for that feeling. She knew Mother had been planting the seeds of guilt in her since she could crawl.  
Shelley ignored the pangs, the itch behind her eyes. A bug bite seducing her, wanting her to scratch. She wouldn't.

Next to her, in the middle seat, Nadia let out a little baby grunt and she stuck her chubby arm out and pointed to the horizon.  
"What?" Shelley inquired and followed the path of the child's finger. She knew to take her hints very seriously.

The further they had driven on towards Vermont, the more hysterical Nadia had become. It had become clear enough that this was no colic.  
Nadia had only stopped crying once Aitor had turned the truck around and had them heading back south.

At least Shelley had managed to see the ocean. She had felt cold sand under her feet, which had been a bit weird. Maybe she simply was more a soil kind of girl after all.

That made her disappointed in herself. Shelley had always been in awe of the sea. And sea people. Especially surfers. How easy they made everything look, not just when they were surfing. They seemed to let life roll over and under them. Get knocked down, get back up. The ocean was always there to wash their wounds clean. Bruised and happy.

Shelley squinted at the horizon. "What's up there?"  
"Uh," clucked Nadia.

There was a soothing orange glow where the sun had set, roughly where Nadia had pointed.  
Shelley managed a smile. She wished she had that kind of compass, the kind that tells you where you belong.

A fat woman in a tracksuit came out of the store. The glass door swung shut behind her, but before it did, Shelley glimpsed Aitor deliberating with the clerk.  
Hustling again.

"Goddammit," she muttered under her breath. She wiped her bigger eye with one bandaged finger.  
Nadia turned her head up and looked at her questioningly.  
Shelley looked back at Nadia, bowed down and kissed her on the head, leaving her looking no less puzzled.  
"You don't know how scary this is, do you?" Shelley asked.

Nadia pointed again. "Eh," she grunted.  
Shelley smiled, nodded, looked.  
The both of them watched the last of the sun's glow until it slipped completely down the drain.

++

**MALENA**

She'd told Nicola that she was going to get nachos and diet coke from the 7-11. As Malena walked briskly down the well-lit sidewalk, she tightened her big yellow coat around her and figured that that probably was a really shitty alibi if she would end up spending the rest of the night at Boyd's place.

But she knew she had to come, no matter how bullshit this wolf story was. After Jeri's call, Malena had taken a two-minute shower, quick-fixed her makeup and picked out a seesaw-patterned violet sweater and some flared jeans. Enough to look good doing just about anything, but not too much to get in the way of the action.  
After hovering her hand over her ear rings, Malena had decided to pocket them and make her mind up about them on the way.

All the while, her chest bubbled with the prospect of shacking up with friends (and interesting strangers), plotting, theorizing, fridge-plundering while a dark Grove night pressed up against their doors.

It was colder than she'd hoped. By the time Malena had turned two corners, she changed her mind and phoned a cab.

She waited under one of the ornate streetlights.  
After 30 seconds, she got bored and got her phone out again and started playing a game.

Something rustled in the bushes behind her. Probably a cat.

Five minutes later, the glow of the taxi sign approaching nudged her attention away from the screen.  
When Malena looked up, she noticed that thin fog had begun to rise at ankle level. How perfect. A thrill of satisfaction settled under her skin.

The taxi pulled up and after Malena greeted the driver - a guy of about forty - she got in.  
"Hi," she said, "Can you take me to 29 Carlan Drive, please."

Her parents and Granma had drilled Malena into checking any cabbie's license to make sure they were legit. Just one of many little rules they had for her. Most of these rules were stupid little things, like this, but they at least had a veneer of practicality. Others were plain Polak superstitions, which Mom and Dad had tried to package and resell as American common sense.

From the back seat, Malena glared at the driver's ID, which was pinned to the usual spot, above the glove compartment.  
All these cabbie pictures looked a little sad, with the guys always looking kinda dead.  
But there was something about this picture that kept Malena looking for longer than she should. Weird, because the guy looked like a total regular guy. Maybe she'd seen him before.

She tore her eyes from the picture and glimpsed the name on the license. Her driver was called Kenneth Felman.  
Felman. She knew there was a farm just outside of town with that name on a crappy wooden sign. There was probably some relation. That name you didn't hear a lot. And the town was pretty small.

"29 Carlan Drive. Near Kilderry, right?" Felman asked, not looking back.

Malena was still echoing the name in her head, so the question off-balanced her. She quickly blinked and pretended to look elsewhere.  
"Kilderry.. Yeah, the park," she said.

"Alright, Miss. Now, I'd be obliged if you would please buckle up," said Felman and smiled at her in the rearview mirror.

"Yeah, sure," said Malena, pulling the seatbelt across her yellow coat. She didn't like that he smiled at her.

The taxi turned and began to head towards Kilderry Park just as it started to rain and Malena rolled eyes at herself for not bringing an umbrella.  
But getting her hair and her awesome new coat wet wasn't one of the things that Granma ever warned her about.

++

**UNDER THE TOWER, STILL**

Another turn. And another.  
Roman, Peter and Doctor Blinsky trudged on and up.

The clinking and groaning of the metal staircase blended with their wheezing and sighing.  
Blinsky especially sounded like he was about to slump down onto the next stair and give up entirely.

"You okay, doc?" Peter's voice echoed.

Blinsky straightened his spine, breathed until his shoulders visibly rose and slowly nodded without looking back at Peter. "Terrible," he heaved from the depth of his lungs, "Terrible. I've never been.. this.. tired."

Peter scoffed, called out with flat joviality: "Come on, doc. We're the ones that died, Roman and I."

Blinsky groaned. "The night is still young."

Both Roman and Peter chuckled at that. The sound of their laughter made at least their next ten paces a little easier.

Peter then looked over his shoulder, back at Roman, and asked him: "So.. what do we do when we get out?" He looked ahead again and kept moving.

"Besides eat?" came Roman's answer from behind, "I guess we gotta find a way to go somewhere, before we even go anywhere. Do you know how to hot-wire a car?"

Peter sighed. "Yeah, I know how to steal a car."

After a moment, Roman whispered with wide-eyed admiration: "Cool."  
Then, a beat later: "Wanna crash at my place?"

Peter let out a dry chuckle. "I was about to ask you over to my trailer, but I really can't say no to running water right now. So yeah, your place."

"Cool," Roman whispered again.

Five minutes or maybe more passed.  
A walkway had come enticingly into view overhead.  
"Here," rasped Blinsky.

Heartbeats rose. Sighs of both relief and anticipation were breathed.

Blinsky was the first to reach the walkway and he almost lost his balance again before he remembered to switch from stair-walking to normal walking.

The walkway led into a short tunnel with a round, rust-stained metal door at the end. The closer they came, the more it looked like a lid. There were no hinges or any irregularities surrounding its edges.  
Nor was there a handle or a keyhole.

Roman's heart sank. "Is this it?"

Blinsky leaned close to the round metal plate and then turned to the side of the tunnel, searching.

Peter shone his small flashlight at wherever Blinsky was groping. "What are we looking for?"

"Something," mumbled the doc.  
His fingers brushed along the grimy metal until they abruptly stopped and began to trace something.  
He then frantically polished at that part with his sleeve, exposing an embedded speaker.

"Klaus.. Blinsky," he spoke into it with what might as well have been his last breath.

He waited. They all waited.

After a pause, Blinsky hesitantly leaned to the speaker a second time.  
"Klaus Blinsky," he said, a little louder.

Nothing happened.

Roman leaned in over Blinsky's shoulder and droned at the mic: "This is Roman Godfrey, I'm the CEO of this bitch, open the fucking door."

That didn't work either.  
Not even a small led light to turn green or red. No way to tell whether their voices had even registered or if they were literally just talking to a wall.

Meanwhile, Peter felt at the edges of the metal lid with his fingers. He didn't even feel a hint of a draft coming from behind it. He rapped his knuckles at it, but it was so thick that it made only the driest of sounds.

Then he was startled when Roman suddenly burst forward and, with a whooping yell, kicked his long leg forward and hit the lid square with his foot.  
A dull thump rebounded back into the tunnel, but the door did not budge at all.

"No, no, that won't do," Blinsky shook his head and shuffled around, looking down at the floor for answers. "That won't do. No."

Grimacing and pacing, Roman raked his fingers through his hair.  
" _They_ fucking did this. The cunts who stole the company. The ones who hijacked my fucking... me!"

He was seething through his teeth.  
But the very next second, his eyes were caught by Peter's, and his rage faltered, flickered away. Roman looked down, stood there for a moment, took long, angry breaths through his nose. Then he pressed his fists against his eyes and broke into a high-pitched, quivering sob. He struggled for control, tried to breathe, tried to stop. But then Peter put an arm around his back and Roman's knees almost gave way.

"Easy," he heard Peter say.  
Roman wiped impatiently at his eyes until they were red. "None of this is easy," he whined, quieter.  
"We'll get the fuckers." Peter rubbed his shoulder blade and Roman exhaled.

Blinsky's sleep-drowsed whisper snapped them out of it. "Light. I need light, please.."  
The doc was kneeling on the cold floor, taking things out of the small satchel that Roman had been carrying.

Peter pointed his light at the things and they were a cluster of metal-cased rectangles, which Blinsky was linking together with USB cables.  
Peter frowned. "Are those hard drives?"

"Phone," Blinsky pleaded, "Where's my phone?"

Roman rushed through the pockets of his labcoat and fished out that rarest of artefacts: an iPhone with an uncracked screen.  
"I got it charged up to 18%." He handed it to the doc.

Blinsky nervously connected the cabled-together belt of hard drives to the phone with a thinner cable. Then he switched on the phone and started an unmarked app.

The screen went bright grey.  
A whole bunch of seconds passed.  
Blinsky was slightly rocking back and forth, not taking his glazed eyes away from the phone.

Roman and Peter moved closer, looked over his shoulder at the blank grey screen.

The doc murmured "Come on, come on."

The screen went black.

Peter and Roman both deepened their frowns.

But Blinsky took in a deep breath and spoke to the phone. "Hello?"

There was a burst of crackling static from the phone's speaker, then a cacophony of ugly glitching sounds...

And then it was silent for two seconds before a roar of semi-digital noise burst from the speaker. It was a jagged shrieking noise that rose in volume until it spilled over. Peter and Roman recoiled and reflexively raised their hands to cover their ears, but Blinsky didn't flinch, didn't blink.

It sounded like a shriek, because that's what it was.

At least, that's what it was until it became hysterical, white noise-stained laughter that echoed through the tunnel.

And when it became words, Blinsky's hand started violently trembling.

"Not real," whisper-hissed the speaker, "No, I'm not real. I'll be quiet, daddy. I promise, I promise. Don't close the door. Please, I'll be quiet. I'll be good. Shhh.. I'll be good."

Something in the wall beeped. Metal shifted with a clunk. The huge, round lid creaked open, just an inch.

Wide-eyed, Roman jumped up, followed by Peter, and together they pulled open the door.  
Cold forest air blew into their noses. They laughed, stumbled forward, into a brand new night.

They looked at each other's face and wondered how they got so pale, while behind them, Blinsky cradled the phone in his hand, stroked it. "It's alright. Everything's gonna be alright," he told it, "Come out. You're okay. You're safe. Full stop."

++

**MALENA**

Carlan Drive. The taxi pulled up to the curb, across from Boyd's house.  
The rain was just a lazy drizzle and it didn't look like it wanted to do more tonight.

"Here we are, Miss. Will it be cash or credit?" Felman's eyes smiled at her from the rearview mirror.

Malena had already got her wallet out and fished out ten dollars.  
She slipped the bill into Felman's fingers and shifted her butt over to the door.  
"Keep the change."

"Thanks, Miss!" The eyes in the mirror never looked at the money.

She pushed the door handle, but it didn't open, and a trickle of worry crept up her sternum.

"Sorry," the eyes in the mirror smiled, "Child lock."  
He flipped something and all the doors unlocked simultaneously.

Without ado, Malena tried again and this time the door did open.  
"Goodnight," she said flatly without looking at the rearview mirror again.

With her first leg already on the pavement, the driver turned his head.  
"Hope you.." he began, but Malena already was rushing herself out of the cab, blurted "You too" over the driver's words and slammed the door.

She tried not to run, but her legs hurried her across the road, right at the projection of safety cast onto the pavement by the streetlight.  
And on her way to that patch of yellow light, her brain puzzled together the parting words of the driver, and presented the result to her consciousness with a round of gameshow applause.

Malena started to chuckle, then got the creeps, then chuckled again.  
The driver's words had been "Hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you have very nice eyes."

_Wow._

She hadn't heard the taxi leave yet. Was he watching? She didn't look back, just quickly left the safety of the streetlight and walked up to Boyd's front door.

Only then did she glance back to see that the taxi was gone.  
_That's one smooth_ _engine_ , her brain mock-terrified her.  
A flock of goosebumps ran between her shoulder blades, caressed her neck.

 _Shit._  
Quickly, she checked her wrists, lifted up her yellow coat sleeves to inspect her arms, but nothing stuck out of them except little blonde hairs standing up.

Relieved, Malena knelt, lifted the big flower pot and took the spare key from under it.  
Normally, she'd knock if she hadn't been invited. But fuck Jeri if she thought she was gonna blow her off with some wolf shit.

Just as she stuck the key in, something rustled in the bushes, the next house over, and Malena pushed through the front door and closed it behind her with her heart fluttering.

Standing in the dark, facing the passage to the living room and the stairs up, Malena caught her breath, took in the familiar smell of the house.

She imagined whatever was outside, was pressed close to the other side of the door behind her; breathing, maybe not.

Malena grinned to herself, giddy with pleasure. For a second, she convinced herself that she could have stayed right here, in the dark of this hallway, the wood creaking under the heels of her ankle boots. Maybe not forever, but until someone - Jeri or Boyd or anyone - would come down and walk into the dark. Only the glisten of her eyes would tell them that something was here.

Malena sighed without a sound.

++

**GODFREY TOWER, OUTSIDE**

Peter and Roman stood in the rain for about two minutes.  
It wasn't even that much rain. A lazy Pennsylvania drizzle.

Roman, still panting his heart out, scoffed. "This is not Shawshank, huh."

Peter's legs trembled antsily. He glared at the wall of pine trees across the road. "Wanna go back in the tunnel?"

Roman spat out a laugh, which he cut short as he proceeded to glance around nervously. He swatted Peter's arm. "We gotta get the fuck out of here. They probably think we're still down in the lab. Let's stay dead, okay?"

Still dazed, Peter nodded. "Yeah." He nodded back towards the tunnel. "What about him? Is he still talking to that thing?"

Roman turned around, paced his long legs back to the open lid and stuck his head in.  
"Doc. You coming?"

Meanwhile, Peter inspected his foot, ran his thumb across the deep red grooves in the sole.

After a moment, Roman pulled Blinsky outside by the arm. The doc's eyes were half closed. So was his mouth.  
"I think he's sleepwalking," said Roman and gently shook him.

In his arms, Blinsky still held the belt of hard drives and the iPhone, clutching them to his chest as he staggered into the open.  
He mumbled some nonsense in response to Roman's shaking, then continued breathing raspily.

Peter frowned. "Is he snoring?"

"Let him. He gave me these." Roman held up a set of keys, dangling it by the biggest one, which obviously belonged to a car.

Sticking close to the walls and the shadows, they quickly sneaked around to the front of the building, where the more prominent staff members parked their vehicles.  
There were still about ten cars out there.

"Which one is it?" whispered Peter.

Roman pressed a button on the key and a perfectly pleasant-looking grey sedan let out a loud, enthusiastic chirp and flashed its lights.

Both he and Peter cringed and ducked back behind the corner wall, yanking Blinsky along with them.

Peter mouthed a not-all-too-condemning _what the fuck_ at Roman, who countered with an apologetic _what can you do_ face.

They waited for a few seconds, peeking to see if anyone was coming out of the Tower to check.  
Roman then quietly stalked out of the shadows, tugging Blinsky's sleeve along. Peter hunched behind them.

"Hurry the fuck up," whispered Roman.

The three ambled, stumbled their way to the grey car, and Roman carefully stood Blinsky into a more or less upright position while he opened one of the back doors for him.

Peter lifted his hands, wanting to help, but Roman shooed him off. "I got this. Get in," he hissed.

Something happened.

Parked right next to them was a modest-sized SUV. Its passenger side door clicked and swung open and a girl leaned out and asked "Excuse me, do you work here?"

Like a pair of idiot rabbits in headlights, Roman and Peter froze.

The girl's voice was anxious rather than berating, and she was squinting in the dark, clearly not seeing them very well.  
Definitely not a guard, but she was still capable of blowing their escape.

"We do," Peter said with professional calm, hoping that the dark hid enough of his sticky-ragged hair and red-streaked hands. "Godfrey Janitorial Services. Can we help you?"

The girl took a second to take in this piece of bullshit.

"Okay. Do you usually wear those coats?"

Peter wore his best underpaid dork smile. Something he picked up working at the garage. "Sure do. The kind of thing we deal with, you don't want getting on your Sunday best."

The girl smiled back. At least her lips did.  
"Yeah, I guess. Sorry if I'm nebby. I'm just waiting for my mom here. Did you see her in there?"

Roman leaned his elbow on the roof of the car, trying to obscure the presence of Doctor Blinsky while at the same time appearing casual.  
He was ready to hypnotize the girl if this went on for too long. For now, he just smiled faintly and admired Peter's flow.

"Ah, we use the service entrance," Peter drawled on, "They don't want our kind scaring the suits away. Say, what's your name? Maybe I can call in for ya."

The girl paused, looked unsure, a little uncomfortable.  
"A girl has no name," she said.

"Huh?" Peter leaned in a little.

The girl waved her words away. "Uhm, nothing. You know, I'll be okay. Thank you. For... helping."

Peter nodded, glanced around the increasingly dark parking lot. "You sure? You don't want to be on your own out here. 'Specially at night."

"Oh! I'm not alone."  
Out of her pocket, she pulled a white and brown rat. Its pink feet stuck out comically as its whiskers twitched at the nocturnal air.

Peter theatrically opened his mouth in mild amazement.  
"Oh well hey, he's cute.."

"It's a she," the girl kindly corrected.

Roman tapped his knuckles on the roof of the car and exhaled heavily.  
Peter glanced at him before looking back at the girl.

" _She_ ," Peter confirmed, "Hey, I'm sorry, but we gotta get out of these." He peeled at the stained lapel of his coat.

"Okay," the girl said, petting her rat's cheek with her thumb, "See you around maybe?"

Peter bowed his head. "I'd be delighted."  
The girl smiled.

There was a beat that appeared to signal the end of their conversation, and Roman relaxed his shoulders.

"So is that your car?" the girl asked pointedly.

Maybe if she had caught Peter on any other day, he wouldn't have done that awkward, fluttering, hesitant blink of the eyes. He also waited too long to respond.  
  
"It is," he said unnaturally, his spit suddenly thick in his throat.

"Looks kinda familiar." The girl's smile had subtly eased into something else.

"Company car," Peter said, "They buy in bulk."

They all froze when a clear snoring sound came from the third janitor.

"Is he asleep?" The girl squinted and stuck out her neck to catch a glimpse of him, but the dark, the sedan and Roman's arm didn't let her see.

Roman butted in with a broad smile. "Yes, he's had a long day, Miss. Days, in fact. And he smells like it too. He's gotta go home now. Goodnight and be safe."

"Wait," the girl began.

Roman opened the back door of the grey sedan and began to shove Blinsky towards it, accidentally knocking the doc's forehead on the edge of the car. Blinsky was shaken out of his slumber and mumbled with dismay.

The girl suddenly jumped up out of her seat and stood on the edge of the SUV's doorway for a better view. " _Dad?_ Dad!"

Peter raised his hands, stammered: "What? No, no, we're not.. Please.."

Roman took a deep breath and stared into the girl's eyes. "Shut up and sit down."

The girl shut up and sat down, bewildered, eyes wide.  
Then, right away, she turned in her seat towards them and made a weird rippling, flicking motion with the fingers of both her hands.

Something shifted in the ether and Peter inhaled sharply as he felt a wave of hot air pass right by him.  
It went for Roman instead. And Roman - with a yelp - got flung backwards and flew over the hood of the next car, tumbled legs up in a heap on the cold paving.

The girl got up out of her seat and jumped out of the SUV.

Peter had both his hands up, one palm towards Blinsky and one towards the girl.  
"Is he your dad? We're.. we were gonna drive him home. He's friends. We're friends."

Ariel paced around the sedan towards Peter and brought up her hands again, the fingers of one of them curling inward to her palm.

Magic.  
Though this girl didn't even look like Destiny, Peter's mind had gone blank.  
Mesmerized, he just let her walk up to him and he wondered if he was about to get launched too or maybe turned into a puppy or something.  
But she just swung and socked him in the cheek. Not even very hard. Her knuckles were sharp though.  
He was surprised enough to trip backwards against the sedan, slamming his shoulders into cold chrome and his head into the door handle.

The girl then practically stepped over him and grabbed the doc by his sleeve.  
"Dad!" she yelled in his face. Blinsky stared right past the girl into nothing.

Peter was clutching the back of his head and tried to blink the stars out of his eyes.  
"It's okay," he groaned.

Ariel was holding Blinsky's face in her hands and then looked down at his clothes.  
"Oh my god."

"That's my blood.. actually," Peter tried.

Roman was back on his feet and stood a few feet away from the girl. He knew every step closer would be one too many.

"Hey," he said in a calm, almost vulnerable voice, "Sorry I was rude. I'm Roman Godfrey. We're just trying to get out of here."

"By stealing my dad's car?" Ariel's teeth glinted through her pout.

Peter, dazed and squatting, mumbled in protest: "We're not stealing anything.."  
Roman cut him off: "He gave us the keys. Come on, does he look like he's driving anywhere?"

Ariel's hands haplessly cupped her father's stubbled cheeks, as if she were inspecting a horse.  
"What the hell happened? Who did this?"

"Drugs. He used drugs. Stayed awake for days. Saved our lives." Roman's voice trembled with adrenaline. "He's our friend, you've got to believe us."

Ariel scoffed. "I don't got to believe anything."

Peter had found his footing again and, while still rubbing his sore head, chipped in: "Yeah, that never really works, Roman. _You have to believe me. I'm not crazy._ Jesus, sometimes I can't tell if you've watched too much tv or not enough."

Roman shrugged, conceded that. "Yeah, well, it's true. We've got to get out of here. You and me and him and your rat too. This place is not safe."

He was interrupted by Blinsky, who finally appeared to regain some focus.  
"Ari," he droned, "Whah.."

"Dad.." Ariel whispered, then turned her head to Peter. "Is he injured?"

Peter frowned. "No, he's just.."

"Really tired," finished Roman, "Look, we gotta move.."

Ariel sharply cut him off. "My mother is still in there, looking for him. What do you mean it's not safe?" Her distrust was slowly shifting away from the two boys.

Roman looked towards the main door of the Tower, his face somehow managing to grow paler.  
"How long's she been in there?"

"Twenty.. minutes. I think," squinted Ariel.

Roman glanced at Peter, then looked to the Tower again.  
"Get in the car, all of you," he said and began to walk to the entrance.

Peter incredulously looked back and forth between him and the Blinskys. "Where are you going? What about her..? Argh, fuck it." He threw up his hands and ran after Roman.

++

**GODFREY TOWER, THE FOYER**

Melissa Blinsky had shown patience. First there had been the young guy at the desk who had serious trouble keeping his cold sweat off his brow. He had looked so sick and pale that she'd ended up feeling sorry for him, in spite of his evasiveness when she inquired about her husband.

The guy had eventually agreed to call in a manager.  
The manager had appeared and he was impeccably professional. He was calm, courteous, not unfriendly, and he had stonewalled her expertly.

Melissa had kept her cool and was eventually escorted to an empty office, where she was told to be patient and that they would try to contact Doctor Blinsky and if she would like sugar in her coffee.

That was easily fifteen minutes ago. The coffee had gone cold.

She was just about to get up when the door was opened and Roman Godfrey CEO stuck his head in.  
His eyes were, for lack of a more apt word, haunted. And the hair that had always appeared so carefully groomed in press pictures, now looked like three days' worth of sweat had dried up in it. He wasn't quite in business attire either. Melissa couldn't decide whether he was wearing a butcher's apron or a labcoat.

Still, there was an innate charm in his face. In photos, he tended to look like the typical, stuck up, young heir. Maybe a bit more miserable.

He smiled at her with mirror-practiced confidence, but still managed to make it look awkward.  
"Mrs Blinsky?"

"Yes?"  
She stood up, slowly picked up her purse.

Roman's smile became a grin. "Your husband is waiting outside. If you would come with me.. like, now.."

"Outside?" Melissa Blinsky frowned.

Before Roman could say more, the manager appeared behind him and put a large hand on his shoulder. "Sir, this area is off-limits to visitors.."

Roman rolled his eyes and turned to face him. When the manager saw who he was, he opened his mouth in surprise.

"Go get me a coffee," Roman told him, "From the 33rd floor."

The manager's mouth stayed goldfish-like. He took a step back. "Yes, sir."

"And forget I was here. Forget her too," Roman instructed, unblinking until the manager had turned away and gone on his business.

When Roman turned back to Melissa, a rivulet of blood had made its way from his nose to his upper lip.  
The smile was gone. He looked tired. Cripplingly tired. And when he asked her "Will you please come?" like a toddler asking his parent to hold his hand in the dark, Melissa nodded and followed.

Outside the office, a shorter young man waited, also in a labcoat, also with that haunted look.

Roman scoffed. "Told you to wait."

The other one smiled at Melissa and joined them in their terse, hurried walk towards the front doors.  
"Dude, I got a whole pack of those cookies you like from the coffee room. Hi, my name is Peter."

"Melissa," said Melissa, baffled.

Roman raised his eyebrows. "The thick ones with the almonds?"

"Yeah, yeah, I think so," said Peter.

They turned into the main hall of the foyer. Roman told the young guy at the desk: "Ben, you're fired. Go home and don't tell anyone you saw us." They exited the building, Roman's nose bleeding worse now. Ariel was standing in the middle of the driveway, waving her arms as soon as she saw them. Melissa hurried, saw who was leaning against the grey sedan, started to run, didn't stop until she held her husband, cried when she saw the blood on him, didn't even realize the terrible smell was his, didn't care. He groaned, kissed her hair, told her he was sorry and that he'd like to go home now.  
Ariel tugged her mom's sleeve and together, with help from Peter and Roman, they moved him towards the SUV, into the back seat. He started making crying sounds, but without tears.  
Voices came from the Tower's entrance. Peter and Roman exchanged looks and opened the doors to the grey sedan. Roman got into the driver's seat, then looked over to Ariel, and shouted: "Go! Go home and get whatever you need and get out of town!"  
Ariel nodded open-mouthed, climbed into the back seat with her father and pulled the door shut. Melissa had also heard Roman and she rushed to get behind the wheel.  
Both vehicles shuddered into action.

++

From the back of the SUV, Klaus Blinsky mumbled "Did uh say dat out loud..?"  
Ariel nervously laughed. "No, dad, you didn't say anything."  
"Buckle him up, honey," her mom droned from the front seat.  
Before Ariel could do any such thing, the vehicle peeled out of its parking spot, sending her crushing into her dad's side. He smelled kinds of bad that she never knew.  
When the SUV turned sharply into the road, she thought she saw four pairs of gleaming black grapes flash in the dark, way too close to the window, but before she could look again, the car was already speeding away.  
It still took a while before the glow of the Tower receded from their rear window.

++

The sedan still stood in its parking spot, engine humming, and Roman tossed the satchel in the back. The Pryce drives inside clattered dully against one another.

Peter shot a look back over his shoulder. "You kept that shit?"

Roman licked his dry lips, adjusted the rearview mirror. "For safe-keeping," he spoke softly to his own reflected eyes. Then he looked to his side, to Peter. "I promised him."

Roman's legs were several inches longer than Blinsky's, so he struggled with the seat until he managed to move it back.

"Roman?"

"Yeah?"  
Roman was still adjusting things, stretching his legs, fumbling to catch the seat belt.  
But he didn't hear Peter say anything more, so he stopped and sat back and looked at him.

Peter was sitting, staring ahead through the car's windshield. The rain was tapping an arrhythmic pattern on the roof and on the glass, distorting the moonlight reflected off the Tower in blurry, meandering strokes.

"Nothing," said Peter. His shoulders carried a deep breath that would budge, but not roll away from them.

Roman watched. He waited for his next breath. Held it until Peter followed.

Then he let the air out. Slow.

When all of it was gone and his lungs were empty, he waited for Peter.

And like that, he fell in line.

After a minute, Roman gently pushed his foot on the gas and the sedan rolled towards the open road, halted when it reached the precipice.  
The rain was starting to tap harder, so he turned on the wipers and they squeaked stodgily over the glass.

"What's gonna be different?" asked Peter.

Roman shrugged slightly, squinted as he looked to the left, to the right.  
"Not much. People will still keep trying to fuck with us, I guess."

Peter scoffed. He ran a hand through his hair, untangled something dry and sticky from it, inspected it, flicked it away.  
"Fucking pricks," he said.

Roman semi-hid a smile.  
"Fucking pricks."

His eyes briefly wandered around the interior of the car. He sniffed.  
"Doc doesn't smoke, does he?"

Peter sucked on his lower lip, shook his head.  
"There's a Burgatory on Perry Road."

Roman's brow perked up.  
"What do they got?"

Peter leaned his head back into his seat, swallowed.  
"Burgers, all sorts of burgers. Cow. Chicken. They even got a crab burger. You can get 'em red on the inside or burned to a crisp. I only been once."

Roman's fingers tapped on the steering wheel.  
"Perry Road, alright. Does it have a drivethrough?"

Peter shook his head. "Nah."

"Then we should get into some not-fucked up clothes first." Roman turned the wheel left.

Peter rolled his head to him, intrigue lifting his tired eyelids. "Where are we going?"

Roman looked back at him, smiled until it didn't feel right or wrong anymore to smile.  
"Home," he said, "Duh."

++

"Allah causes the night and the day to succeed each other. Truly, in these things is indeed a lesson for those who have insight."

\- Quran 24:44

♫ _Fishmans - Night Cruising_


	5. preview of episode 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, I'm sort of avalanched with things; hence the delay. But ep 5 is about halfway finished and here's the first chapter to start you off...

**THE CAR**

The drone of the car's engine had slipped so insidiously into Roman's ear that he didn't notice that he was steadily humming along.  
Only when he felt the itch of Peter's eyes on him did he become aware, and he cut out his humming and threw a nervous look back at Peter.  
Their glances crossed, and out of the two of them, Peter was left the more embarassed. He sort of blinked and looked away apologetically. _If you gotta hum to stay sane, then hum._

Roman looked back to the road ahead. Reality almost immediately started drifting again, and he bit his lip to stay focused.

Neither of them had said anything for a while. And they didn't say anything now.

They were driving down Whitfield Road, but Roman's eyes kept straying to look at his hands, because his knuckles kept going tense and pale and he had to keep being sure that it was just nerves.

What if he suddenly, for no reason, stepped on the gas, then jerked the wheel to the left and smashed the car into one of those big, ugly oak trees?

Roman took a deep breath and inside his brain, he willed himself, his self, his fucking spirit or whatever... to claim that front seat, clutch the controls tightly, not let go. His hands had begun to sweat on the hard leather.

His panic came in eerie, wet waves.  
And at the peak of each one, he swore he was going to pull over and let Peter switch seats with him. But he never pulled over and he shoved the thought away until it stayed away.

"You alright?" Peter asked him. On hearing his voice, Roman remembered to breathe again.

"Yeah!" Roman said, a little louder than necessary, "I mean no. Everything's totally fucked. But at least I'm not dead anymore and we're getting burgers."  
He tried to chuckle, but it came out as a weird, crooked coughing, so he put his knuckles to his mouth to make it look like that's what was happening.

Peter scoffed benignly. "You just gave birth to me," he said with wonder and a certain giddiness at the proposterous concept.

Roman shook his head. "Get the fuck out." Then he chewed on it for a few seconds, while he watched the lines on the road. "I threw you up. That's not giving birth."

He frowned.

Peter had drawn his bare feet up on the seat and was holding on to one of his ankles. Roman noticed and looked a little annoyed and he realized it was because Peter was sitting like a girl.

"You absolutely did," Peter stated very matter of factly, "You gave birth to me. I wouldn't have been able to get back to my body if you hadn't done what you did."

Roman shook his head, shrugged. "I don't even remember. Did.. Did I eat you?"

Peter nodded. "That's exactly what you did. You're the fucking dragon. You can do shit like that."

" _Dragon_.." Roman mocked, chuckling.

But Peter's eyes defiantly deflected any mockery.  
"You know you always felt like you had to be this warrior?" he insisted, "Well, it's real, it's happening. Most people don't get this kind of purpose, but you did."

Roman blushed, smiled, protested. "I guess something is happening," he relented, "But I'm nobody's fucking mom."

"It was pretty awesome," said Peter, stretching one leg to rest on the dash. Then he seemed to think of something or someone and he bit his lip and looked at the road.

Another car came from the other direction and when it passed, Roman was startled because some woman in the back of the car had her mouth torn wide open in a scream. It took him seconds before he realized that she was probably yawning.

It left him shaken, and he kept his eye on the dimming tail lights of the car in the side mirror until they disappeared.

"I don't know," Roman spoke up because he had the creeps and the silence was starting to seep into his skin again, "I don't know what we're gonna do."  
Peter didn't answer, so Roman raised his voice a little. "We should just get out of town. We're gonna get Nadia and we're getting the fuck out of here."

Peter's brow rose. "And then what?"

Roman shrugged irritably. "I don't know. Find Shelley, I guess. She never wanted to be here. Had the right idea all along."

They slowed for a lone, pointless red light.  
Tree branches hung so low they scraped their fingernails over the hood of the car.

Peter shook his head.  
"I don't think so. These people.. the ones that are after us.. I saw some of them. The ones that stitched that hair into your aorta. They're not like those guys in the masks. And they're not just here in Grove. These motherfuckers are everywhere."

Roman tapped the wheel with his fingers.  
"What do you mean you saw them? Where?"

"Not literally or physically. I just caught a glimpse, okay? Through that hair. I followed the magic."

"You followed the magic," Roman chuckled a little.

"I followed the magic," Peter sighed, "And they're like this unseen hand. They pull strings. They own people."

"Like the maffia?" Roman was intrigued.

"Or the fucking illuminati, whatever. Point is they're this unseen hand that's been moving things around in town. Little things at first. And then us."

"Jesus..." Roman looked worried, but at least he could make something like sense out of an occult maffia illuminati gang, "So if these fuckers are everywhere, where do we go?"

Peter shook his head. "I dunno. Maybe into the woods? For tonight, at least. I think the trailer's still got some blankets under the floor."

Roman looked doubtful. "Won't they look for us there? The unseen hand?"

"Yeah," said Peter, "Probably. Maybe you should turn off the headlights before we get close to your house."

"It's just around the corner.." Roman gestured with his hand.

"Yeah, so turn 'em off."

 

++


End file.
